He shrugged. "Ces garces, elles etaient chaudes lapines. " Their rebellion took the form of promiscuity. It was disgusting. I had hoped for alliances with some of my a.s.sociates. It is an excellent way of cementing loyalties you see but these sisters.l.u.ts balked. They took my gifts made promises then did as they pleased. Coercion as you know has its limits. Perhaps I was too domineering during their early adolescence and fear made them reckless. At any rate it was not working and they were behaving scandalously bringing the family into disrepute. I will not have that.
"Mon zob!" I sneered - then nearly screamed out loud as he fetched my mind a blinding wallop.
Watch yourself Uncle Rogi... So you find my yearnings after bourgeois respectability amusing do you? You weren"t impressed by the progress of Remco Pulp and Chemicals? Perhaps you don"t realize how far along I"ve come in the business world. Small wonder when we hardly ever see one another except at funerals. That will change.
The elevator arrived and we got in. I was so tightly controlled that I couldn"t blink without the young b.a.s.t.a.r.d"s permission. But he couldn"t keep me coerced forever...
He said: No. And that"s the problem overall. With Maman and the family and even with my notorious older brother! Unlike you Uncle Rogi I have ambitions. And they will require the close cooperation of others whose loyalty I can count upon. Yvonne is eighteen and compliant. She is not nearly so good-looking as her late older sisters but she has youth and my a.s.sociate Robert Fortier will find her acceptable. Pauline unfortunately is still too young but she will mature.
Good G.o.d you"re scheming up a f.u.c.king dynasty - Tu l"as dit bouffi!
The elevator reached the lobby and disgorged us. Victor handed the two bags to me, deposited the card-key in the box at the desk, and thriftily had a clerk validate his parking ticket. Then we headed for the lower-level elevators. For the first time I began to realize what a desperate situation I was in. I still didn"t entirely understand why he wanted me, but want me he did. He could coerce me into doing any number of things and lock me up incommunicado in the interim without Denis suspecting anything. Denis was, after all, distracted by matters of global importance; erratic behavior by his black-sheep uncle was only to be expected.
We descended into the bowels of the great hotel. The lowest parking level, where Victor had had to park his Porsche because of the convention crowd, was quiet, very cold, and virtually deserted. He drew me along in his wake as he strode to the sports car.
We"ll take the interstates up to Hanover. Tomorrow we can begin making arrangements for your move. By the time Denis gets wind of it you"ll be settled in Berlin and they"ll be reading the banns at Saint Anne"s.
The banns!...
Of course. Don"t you understand Uncle Rogi? You"re going to marry Maman and relieve Denis"s anxieties about her and help make certain that my surviving brothers and sisters remain under my control. And I"ll find other uses for you too as time goes on.
"No!" I yelled. And from some mental reservoir I called up the power to snap his coercive lead. I flung the two bags at his head. He ducked and they skidded across the polished white hood of the car. He struck back at me and it was as though twin ice picks had been driven into my ears. I shrieked and almost fell, then recovered with a heroic act of will and tried to run. A mental thunderbolt struck me between the shoulder blades and seemed to sever my spine. I sprawled headlong, still screaming, and in seconds he was on me.
"Ferme ca, vieux dindon! Arrete de deconner!" Victor knelt on my chest and grabbed me by the hair. His eyes were like paired heliarc torches and I knew he could fry my gray matter and turn me into a drooling idiot if he chose... but he didn"t want to go that far. He needed me and so he hesitated with his psychocreative lobotomy, and I saw my last chance. The knot of fire ignited behind my breastbone and stark terror and prayer accelerated it into an out-spiral: around and around and around. Victor"s blazing eyes dimmed with surprise and then alarm. He let go of my head and flinched, so that the ball of energy I shot at him did not strike his face but glanced along the edge of his skull just above the hairline, cauterizing a shallow furrow in scalp and bone.
He howled and fell off me. In desperation I rolled under a nearby Winnebago camper with my nerves on fire from the psychozap and most of my muscles turned to Jell-O. I knew I was a goner. I could hear Victor scrambling on the pavement and reviling me in French and English.
And then he dropped like he"d been brained with a sledgehammer.
I lay there in semidarkness, smelling the Winnie"s cha.s.sis lubrication and a burnt-pork stench. Victor was utterly still except for slow, stertorous breathing.
There were measured footsteps approaching: klok... klok... klok ... the sound amplified by the dank concrete walls and pillars of the underground garage, that haunt of lurking urban menace. I felt my neck-hairs p.r.i.c.kle and my guts go loose. I couldn"t see the aura of the approaching operant because it was deliberately being suppressed; but I could feel it, like the horrid quavering of the nerves when you stand under high-voltage power lines.
My view of him was cut off by the rows of parked cars until he came up to where Victor lay. I saw st.u.r.dy Timberland high-tops with red wool socks and black chinos stuffed into them. Arms enclosed in down mackinaw sleeves reached down to grasp Victor, taking the back of his belt in one ma.s.sive hand and the collar of his jacket in the other. My nephew"s body ascended out of view. The booted feet plodded to the Porsche and I heard a heavy thud, as if some vandal had desecrated the expensive vehicle by plonking a duffel bag full of books onto the roof. The car door opened and there was a softer thud. The door slammed.
The feet approached the Winnie and my two travel bags were set down next to it. The aetheric tension had dissipated and I felt enveloped in blessed relief.
A telepathic voice said: Victor will think you did it. That was quite a commendable mental effort of yours. It provided a neat cover-up for my necessary obtrusion.
Is that you?
Who else?... I don"t think you"ll have to worry about interference from Victor for a few years now. He"ll give you up as a bad job and try to find other ways to cope with his family problems.
But Sunny - You"ve probably saved her life. To say nothing of your own. Once the two of you were married, Victor would have felt free to activate his unconscious oedipal retribution fantasy, wiping out his mother"s threat to his ambitions.
I don"t understand.
Then I suggest you reread Hamlet. But not on a dark and stormy night ... Au "voir, cher Rogi. Until the next time.
I began to squirm out from under the camper. The booted feet walked away, their sound dispersed by the serried ranks of parked vehicles. By the time I was able to stand up, the underground garage was silent again. I could see Victor, unconscious, slumped behind the wheel of the Porsche.
Eh bien, Rogi, you long streak of p.i.s.s. Saved again! Or is your psychocreativity more inventive than you suspect?
I picked up my bags. My suit was filthy and I had no doubt that my face was, too; but front-desk personnel are inured to such things during science-fiction conventions. No explanation would be required. All I had to do was say that I had changed my mind about checking out.
I went to the elevator and pressed the Up b.u.t.ton. The d.a.m.ned thing took forever to arrive.
7.
CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE, EARTH.
13 MAY 1995.
JARED ELLSWORTH, S. J.: Denis! Wonderful to see you again. Sit down! Sit down! What has it been - ten years?
DENIS REMILLARD: Twelve. When I got my M.D.
ELLSWORTH: And a lot of water"s gone over the dam since then, hasn"t it? Brebeuf Academy is very proud of you, Denis. I shouldn"t admit this, but we haven"t been exactly diffident about letting endowment prospects know that you were one of our early alumni.
REMILLARD: Oh, that"s perfectly all right, Jared. It makes me feel less guilty about not doing more for the Academy myself.
ELLSWORTH: Nonsense. We"ve appreciated your generous contributions. You"ll be glad to know that Brebeuf"s gimmick has been copied in other parts of the world. Now there are a dozen or so other free schools for the gifted children of low-income families. But I haven"t heard that any of them harbored a really wild talent like you! Merely normal geniuses. [Laughs.]
REMILLARD: You might be interested to know that the operant population has about the same IQ spread as the normal. Just as many dummies among us as smarta.s.ses.
ELLSWORTH: That could lead to problems.
REMILLARD: It has. We don"t talk about it very much publicly. A German team just completed a study, a metapsychic a.s.say of prisoners and inmates of inst.i.tutions for the criminally insane. A disproportionate percentage of the incarcerated con men and bunco artists show traits of suboperancy in the coercive and telepathic modes. The percentage of psychopaths with operant traits is also higher than expected.
ELLSWORTH: [whistles] Any theories about that?
REMILLARD: The psychos might have kept their sanity if their fragile minds hadn"t been burdened with the additional load of operant function - with all the stress that entails. Mental evolution is bound to leave a lot of maladaptive souls fallen by the wayside. The operant crooks who kept their marbles adapted - but the wrong way. They used the mind-powers opportunistically. It"s a big temptation, even among the high-minded. The less intelligent metacriminals got caught, probably not even realizing that they had the powers. They thought the mind reading was just keen insight and the coercion a gonzo personality. The more intelligent operant crooks would still be at large, of course. No doubt highly regarded by their beneficiaries and d.a.m.ned by their enemies as financial wizards...
ELLSWORTH: It makes you wonder about the charismatic leaders of sleazy cults. And certain great and magnetic villains of history such as. .h.i.tler and Stalin.
REMILLARD: Someday, when we know more about the genotypes for operancy, there"ll be some fascinating research done. But today, we"re more concerned about this - this lower stratum of operants for pragmatic reasons.
ELLSWORTH: Mm"m. I can imagine. Bound to be baddies among you, of course, as in any other human population. But it"s a thing not too many normals thought about prior to Dr. Weinstein"s trial - not that he could be cla.s.sed among your common or garden variety of delinquent. [Takes out a pipe and begins to pack it with tobacco.] The criminal operant will pose tricky legal problems. I suppose the really powerful ones would be able to coerce juries and witnesses as well as read the minds of the prosecuting attorneys.
REMILLARD: Probably. But the real difficulty isn"t in the courtroom antics. After all, the authorities can always do as the Scottish Lord of Justiciary did in the Weinstein case: bring in a watchdog operant as an amicus curiae to be on the lookout for mental hanky-panky. No... the problem is going to be getting the goods on operant crooks in the first place. Superior metacriminals would be able to cover their tracks in any number of mind-bending ways. Posthypnotic suggestion, for instance. This has great limitations and probably wouldn"t work at all in blatant cases like first-degree murder in front of witnesses, but it might very well succeed in less emotionally charged crimes. Frauds and conspiracies and other kinds of white-collar shenanigans. You"re no doubt aware that the financial world is still in an uproar over its theoretical loss of transaction secrecy. Objectively, the financiers know that the chance of a crooked operant spying on them is close to zero. Now. But what about later, as operants become more numerous? The global economy is in a much shakier condition than most people realize due to the impact of operancy. Not many economic a.n.a.lysts have written about the matter. They"re afraid of making the situation worse. It was bad enough when all they had to worry about was Psi-Eye investigations of KGB and CIA bank accounts in Switzerland. This new recognition of potential operant criminality has thrown them into a real swivet. And there"s no remedy yet. We"ll have to wait until more operants are trained for oversight work - and are willing to take it on. It"s not going to be the most popular career choice among idealistic young heads.
ELLSWORTH: Thought police! Good heavens, what an idea.
REMILLARD: [laughs hollowly] You should see my hate mail! The common folks aren"t quite so sure anymore that operants belong to the League of Superheroes. Have you ever watched that Alabama TV evangelist, Brother Ernest? According to him, we"re nothing less than the vanguard of Antichrist, the mystery of iniquity, with all power and signs and lying wonders... and the Last Judgment is only five years away! It"s to laugh - until you realize how many viewers the man has. And there are other antioperant movements poking their noses out of the woodwork. That outfit in Spain, Los Hijos de la Tierra, the Sons of Earth. And the Muslim fundamentalists are fully convinced we"re the agents of El Shaitan. You know, Jared, operancy will bring about a profound social revolution during the Third Millennium - but only if we operants manage to survive the Second! There"s a real possibility that militant normals might opt for the easy way out of the dilemma we pose...
ELLSWORTH: [waving out a match and snorting smoke] Don"t give me that eschatological bulls.h.i.t! Defeatism? From somebody who had the finest Jebbie education lavished on him? [Gestures to photo portrait of Teilhard de Chardin by Karsh of Ottawa.] From somebody who sopped up Papa Pierre"s nostalgie de l"unite and global consciousness and optimistic expectation of Omega like a thirsty young sponge? Don"t talk poppyc.o.c.k! You swelled heads are a challenge for us normals, but we"re going to work it out. This isn"t the Dark Ages, and the hysterical fools don"t rule.
REMILLARD: No. Thank G.o.d, they don"t. You"ll have to make allowances for me, Jared. I"m afraid I"ve always had a tendency to fall into negativism and intellectual agonizing when the going gets tough. That"s more or less why I came to see you.
ELLSWORTH: And here I thought it was to atone for your shameful neglect of your old teacher all these years.
REMILLARD: I need a very specialized kind of moral advice. None of the ethicists at Dartmouth had the foggiest notion of what I was talking about. Their counsel was worthless.
ELLSWORTH: Was it really! Oh, the arrogance of the intellectual elite. n.o.body has problems like you have problems. I always think of John von Neumann on his deathbed, deciding to convert. Is he thinking humbly about making his peace? Is he awed at the imminence of the Infinite? No. He says, "Get me a smart priest. "
REMILLARD: [smiling] So they brought him a Jesuit, of course.
ELLSWORTH: [sighs] I"ll bet it still cost him an extra half hour in purgatory. But never mind that. What"s your b.i.t.c.h?
REMILLARD: There are two of them, Jared, with both universal and particular application. The first goes under the seal of confession.
ELLSWORTH: Uh-huh.
REMILLARD: It concerns a matter we"ve already touched on. Suppose I know the ident.i.ty of a metapsychic criminal. But the way I found this person out was by mental intrusion: reading the secret thoughts. A deliberate violation of which our crook was unaware.
ELLSWORTH: This is your great moral dilemma ? Same thing as stealing a letter that incriminates. The theft is wrong.
REMILLARD: I acknowledge the guilt. That"s not the problem. If it was a letter I stole, I could send it to somebody in authority who could take action. When you steal thoughts things aren"t so easy.
ELLSWORTH: No.
REMILLARD: Aside from my reading this person"s mind and discovering the general fact of wrongdoing, there is no proof whatsoever of the person"s guilt. He was not fantasizing, because I can see the effects of his crimes quite clearly. But the perpetrator is ordinarily an excellent screener - you know about that? okay - and most probably no other honest operant person has the least inkling what he has been up to. There is no corroborating evidence of crime, nothing that would stand up in a court of law. Some of the things he"s done wouldn"t even fall under our present criminal code. For instance, there"s no law against mind-to-mind mayhem; at most, our courts would view it as simple or aggravated a.s.sault, with the injury not provable. So what am I going to do?
ELLSWORTH: [expels smoke slowly] Neat.
REMILLARD: I thought you"d like it. Objectively, that is. It"s s.h.i.t City when you"re on the inside looking out.
ELLSWORTH: This metapsychic monster of depravity. He"s intimately known to you? I mean, you"re close enough so that there"s absolutely no possibility that you"ve misunderstood the situation?
REMILLARD: The person is a relative.
ELLSWORTH: Uh-huh. And we are dealing with very serious moral matters?
REMILLARD: The most serious.
ELLSWORTH: Obviously, you can"t haul this person down to your local police station and - uh - turn his mind inside out.
REMILLARD: Obviously not. Firstly, he would probably kill me if I tried it. Secondly, even if I did succeed in wringing a confession out of him - say with the help of operant friends - it would be inadmissible evidence. In the United States, one may not be forced to incriminate oneself.
ELLSWORTH: The only logical recourse is to try to nail him with some evidence that"s concrete. Do as the government snoops do: use the illegally obtained information to scratch up other stuff that will hold up in court. You understand - hem! - that I"m not advising you to do anything sinful.
REMILLARD: But... I couldn"t.
ELLSWORTH: You couldn"t, or you wouldn"t? Do you mean you"re too busy to see justice done? You"ve got other things to do?
REMILLARD: [doggedly] Yes. I have duties. Obligations to the metapsychic operant community. To evolving humanity as a whole. To find evidence against this one miserable b.a.s.t.a.r.d might be impossible. There might not be any. Searching for it could alert him and endanger me. Endanger my work.
ELLSWORTH: You seriously believe he"d try to kill you?
REMILLARD: Or do me grave mental damage.
ELLSWORTH: You are never morally obligated to put yourself in danger in order to do good. Caritas non obligat c.u.m tanto incommodo. One can a.s.sume such an obligation freely, as officers of the law do, but a private individual does not have such a duty.
REMILLARD: [sighs] I thought not.
ELLSWORTH: On the other hand, Christ told us we"re blessed when we give up our life for our friends. It is the ultimate magnification of love. Of course, he was propounding a behavioral ideal... The valiant thing is not always the prudent thing. As you say, you have your work, and it is undoubtedly important.
REMILLARD: I - I can"t just stand by and let him get away with what he"s done! He may do it again.
ELLSWORTH: You could be patient. Bide your time and watch.
REMILLARD: I"m so distracted by other things. This is... so small compared to the other problems I have to deal with. So d.a.m.ned personal. I pushed it aside earlier when all I had were suspicions, and that was wrong. My negligence cost lives. Now that I"m certain about him, there doesn"t seem to be anything I can do.
ELLSWORTH: You think you"re the only one who ever faced this? It"s old, Denis! Old as the human race. Listen to King David: "Be not vexed over evildoers. Trust in the Lord and do good. Commit to the Lord your way; trust in him and he will act. He will make justice dawn for you like the sun; bright as the noonday shall be your vindication. "
REMILLARD: This evildoer is my brother.
ELLSWORTH: Oh, son.
REMILLARD: It may be my fault he"s like this. I never liked him. I never tried to show him that what he was doing was wrong. When I was a kid, I was relieved to get away from home and come here, away from him. When I was a grown man I still avoided him, even though I knew he had deliberately suppressed the mind-powers of my other young brothers and sisters. I was afraid. I still am.
ELLSWORTH: You should get your siblings away from his influence.
REMILLARD: I tried. Only one of them is legally an adult, and she won"t come. He"s mesmerized her. The others... I tried to convince my mother to come away with them. I know she wanted to, but she still refused. He"s influenced her, too. I can"t force them.
ELLSWORTH: Then you"ve done all you can for now. Keep working on your mother and the older sister but don"t do anything to endanger them... You really do think there"s further danger from this brother of yours?
REMILLARD: I suspect that he"s killed certain individuals who were a threat to his business. I know for a certainty that he killed three of my sisters who defied him.
ELLSWORTH: Oh, my G.o.d. If I was in your shoes, I expect I"d go for the sonuvab.i.t.c.h with a shotgun and a bag of rifled slugs.
REMILLARD: No, you wouldn"t. Neither would I. That"s the h.e.l.l of it ... All right, Jared, let"s table this one. All I can do is follow your advice and wait. Now this second problem is by no means as grave, so let"s discuss it ex confessio - ELLSWORTH: Don"t you want your absolution?
REMILLARD: Oh... I didn"t really think of this dialog as an actual confession. I only put you under the seal to protect you from any hazardous obligation you might otherwise have felt constrained to a.s.sume.
ELLSWORTH: The mention of grace embarra.s.ses the learned psychiatrist! It never occurs to you to accept the forgiveness of Christ. You"re like millions of other educated Catholics, Denis. You"ve kept the sense of guilt but not the sense of sin, and absolution without solution looks like a cop-out to you. It seems too d.a.m.ned easy.
REMILLARD: Maybe.
ELLSWORTH: But that"s what grace is all about. It"s a gift and a mystery. We"re allowed to take it if we"re sorry - even if we can"t undo the evil we"ve done. A psychiatrist tries to offer solutions to guilt, but very often, as in your case, there are no solutions. That"s where we priests have the advantage. We can channel the grace even if you feel you don"t deserve it.