Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (19 page)

The Human Polity’s relationship with the exotic races was largely cordial. The Simbiari now cooperated with humans in a wide variety of scientific works and at the same time resigned themselves to being forever unappreciated by their ungrateful ex-wards. The bonhomous little Poltroyans had become humanity’s most enthusiastic trading partners and closest allies. The Gi love affair with human arts and entertainment persisted, while Earthlings had learned to tolerate that strange race’s flamboyant and outrageous behavior. The Krondaku were as ever ponderously benevolent, and as ever skeptical of long-term human potential. As for the wise and evanescent Lylmik, they remained enigmatic and were hardly ever at home to callers.

Two sessions ago, the plenary Concilium had adjudged that the Human Polity was in such good shape that it was time to think about redefining the office of Human First Magnate, pruning it of autocratic and troubleshooting accretions that had been necessary during the formative years and making it more of a true presidency. Paul Remillard enthusiastically supported the decision and was reelected by a huge majority. He then decided it was time for him to settle permanently again on Earth. He was tired of apartments and felt he had worked hard enough to deserve a real home and some sort of normal social life.

But where would he live?

The old family place on South Street in Hanover was out of the question. Two of Paul’s adult children, Marie and Luc, still lived there together with Denis and Lucille. So had young Jack, until he entered Dartmouth College as a ten-year-old prodigy and took up residence in the freshman dorm. Marc, Paul’s oldest child, having earned a string of advanced degrees and immersed himself in CE research financed by the family foundation, had dipped into his all-but-untouched investment fund and bought a tiny, isolated house in the hills east of Hanover. Paul’s brothers and sisters also had permanent residences in and about the
lovely old town and they now urged him to build his new home in the vicinity and rejoin the close-knit family circle.

Unspoken was the Dynasty’s hope that the First Magnate would marry again and have done with the series of well-publicized sexual liaisons he had pursued since the death of Laura Tremblay. But Paul was not about to let the family cramp his style. He chose to live in Concord, a safe 90 kilometers away.

When Paul was not presiding over his metapsychic peers at Concilium sessions or otherwise engaged in Polity affairs, he was supposedly a private citizen just as the other magnates were, free to enjoy any lifestyle and engage in whatever personal or professional business he chose. Practically speaking, however, it would have been unseemly for the First Magnate to resume his career in the North American Intendancy as just another IA. Even under the new order, there were still semiofficial calls on Paul’s time when he was away from Orb, notwithstanding the fact that the turmoil of the shakedown years had subsided.

Paul suggested that he set up an unofficial headquarters for the First Magnate, separate from the bureaucracy of the Concilium and having no ties to the Office of the Dirigent for Earth. He would hold himself available for extraordinary consultation and use his free time to study Milieu law and human-exotic relations. His proposal was accepted, and the Human Polity voted to provide him, gratis, whatever kind of dwelling he fancied.

The First Magnate might have chosen to live in splendor. A replica of the Château de Versailles or even Mad King Ludwig’s sumptuous Neuschwanstein Castle could have been his for the asking. His family and colleagues assumed he would at the very least erect some stately home appropriate to his exalted position.

But instead Paul Remillard indulged his notorious whimsy.

When Lucille Cartier, renowned in the Dartmouth academic community as an arbiter of good taste, first clapped unbelieving eyes on her son’s new home in Concord, she pronounced it to be a bastard cross between a Swiss chalet and a wedding cake.

“It’s nothing of the kind.” Paul had been polite but firm in the face of his mother’s disapproval. “It’s an authentic reproduction of a carpenter-gothic New England cottage, in the style of the mid-nineteenth-century American architect Andrew Jackson Downing. The original version of this little beauty is still standing downstate in Peterborough.”

His mother said, “It’s preposterous!”

“But it suits me,” the First Magnate had gently replied, “and
I paid for it myself just so that I can take it with me when the Concilium lets me retire.”

The white-painted wooden “cottage” had ten rooms—not including the west wing with its little ballroom, informal executive offices, and domestic apartments. Beneath the 20 hectares of landscaped grounds was a sophisticated subterranean complex that included everything from garages and a private subway terminal to a subspace communicator station. The quaint main house sported pointed-arch windows with pointed black shutters, handsome square columns on the porches and rear veranda, and scrollwork bargeboards dripping from the edges of the roof like ornate wooden lace. The overall exterior effect was conceded even by hostile architectural critics to be warmly human.

The dayrooms featured polished oak floors, stone fireplaces, sprigged wallpaper, and a cosy, eclectic mix of colonial and Victorian furniture. Paul’s private bedroom was in the simple Shaker style; but the four spacious guest chambers were decorated in frontier rustic, baroque Federalist, nineteenth-century Chicago cathouse, and 1930s Hollywood Art Deco. Robots in the woodwork and a small staff of nonoperant employees did the housework.

Paul’s cook was a laconic Yankee named Asahel Fitch, whose culinary specialties were New England boiled dinners, lobster salad, coq au vin, and pot roast. Fitch’s wife Elsie did desserts and flower-arranging and also supervised the wine cellar, the only area of the cottage where the vast Remillard family fortune proclaimed itself. It was a repository of the Galaxy’s rarest and most costly vintages and ardent spirits—plus a case or two of good old Wild Turkey for the times that Uncle Rogi came to visit. When the First Magnate entertained semiofficially, he hired the best caterers in Old Concord, or flew them in from other Earth cities as far away as Kuala Lumpur. If a more intimate supper for two was appropriate—as it often was—the Fitches got the night off and Paul whipped up crêpes or a fancy omelet himself.

About 100 meters from the First Magnate’s cottage, at the margin of the surrounding woodland, stood a frivolous wooden summerhouse furnished with white-painted wicker chairs and settees and a number of discreet high-tech appurtenances. Paul indicated this structure to his brothers and sisters as they walked across the darkening lawn.

“We’ll wait for Papa there. The place has a dumbwaiter to
keep us supplied with drinks, and a state-of-the-art sigma-field installation we can activate for complete privacy during the family council. We might see some luna moths while we wait if we’re lucky.” He led the way among the irregularly shaped rose beds.

“A sigma?” Adrien was taken aback. “You really think someone might eavesdrop? What the hell is this confab about, anyhow?”

Paul glanced back over his shoulder, smiling without mirth. “There are a number of matters we need to discuss. One particularly involves you and Sevvy.”

“Is that so?” Adrien spoke lightly, but there was a hint of defiance in his mien. He resembled a less polished version of Paul with a small mustache and no beard; but his immortality genes had climaxed at a much earlier age, giving him a boyish air almost as incongruous as that of his father, Denis.

“So we’re going to get political,” groaned Severin. “I was half afraid of something like that when you summoned all six of us to Concord like a gang of wayward prep-schoolers.”

“Paul did nothing of the sort.” Catherine’s defense was prompt and wholehearted. “What in the world’s got into you two?”

Maurice said, “Perhaps the loyal opposition to Unity is feeling just a trifle bumptious after its boost in the last constituent poll.”

“A disgrace,” Anne said. “You lot never would have got that high a vote percentage if you hadn’t stooped to disinformation.”

“Disinformation—?” Severin exploded. “Look who’s talking. What well-known petticoat-Jebbie legal scholar tried to twist the Pope’s arm so he’d issue an encyclical saying that Unity doesn’t pose a threat to human free will?”

“It doesn’t,” said Anne.

“Que tu dis,” sneered Adrien. “We’ve got tame theologians on our side who’ll match your guys jot for tittle swearing it does. Psychologists, too! Anytime you Jesuits and swamis want a
real
debate on the Interstellar Tri-D Forum instead of an eye-glaze contest on the Philosophical Channel, we’ll bring on Rabbi Morgenstern and Cardinal Fujinaga and Doctor Aziza Khoury to clean your clocks.”

Briefly, Anne’s composure slipped. “Unity is a serious subject for debate. You and your Rebels won’t be allowed to trivialize it by treating it like some game show!”

“No,” Severin said. “But the matter’s not going to be decided behind closed doors by your clique of operant mystics, either.”

Paul had thus far ignored the bickering, but now he broke in to thank his siblings for coming to this emergency family conference.

Anne’s tone was cynical. “There was a choice? I had to egg in from a meeting of theologians in Constantinople. My paper will have to be delivered by Athanasius Wang, and he’ll drone on and put everyone to sleep.”

“Surely not,” Catherine said. “What’s the subject?”

“ ‘The Unanimisation Concept of St. Teilhard de Chardin as a Prefiguring of Unity.’ ”

“Ye gods and little fishes,” croaked Adrien.

Anne shrugged. “Unity’s going to happen, no matter how much you latter-day Sons of Earth piss and moan. Full participation in the Milieu by humanity demands that we embrace a consonant mental relationship with the Galactic Mind.”

Severin’s chuckle was ominous. “Think again, little sister. There are alternatives to the lockstep mentality of Unity, and you can be damned sure they’re going to be discussed openly and exhaustively. Humanity has a right to
choose
whether or not to risk its racial individuality in a permanent mind-meld with exotics.”

“Of course it does,” Anne retorted. “But if your faction continues to spew distortions and half-truths instead of helping to clarify the issue, how in the world will people be able to make an informed choice? The tirade that Annushka Gawrys spouted before the Concilium last session was full of calculated misstatements—”

“You mean,” Adrien broke in, “she raised points that hit too close to the mark for comfort! You ought to come down from your ivory tower once in a while and listen to what the normals and the metas opposed to Unity are saying. It’s not operancy that worries the ordinary folks, it’s the notion of being controlled by inhuman
humans!
”

“Please.” The First Magnate held up an admonitory hand. “There are good reasons why we should wait until we’re behind the sigma before discussing this any further.” As Paul spoke aloud, his formidable coercion gently touched their minds. They were all Grand Masters, all Magnates of the Concilium, all among the most powerful human minds in the Galaxy. But at that moment, their youngest brother’s will was irresistible.

For a time they continued walking in silence.

Finally, Philip ventured to say: “You made some changes in the rose garden, didn’t you, Paul?”

“I had the gardeners rip out all the trendy new varieties the landscapers stuck in. The sky-blue ones, and the blacks and purples and lime greens, and the ones with fringed petals and polka dots and stripes.”

“Once again … you surprise me. I never realized you were such a traditionalist at heart.” The firstborn of the Dynasty had a pleasant homely face with a receding hairline, and he tended slightly to portliness. Philip Remillard was sixty-five years old but seemed to be in his late forties. The only one of the family who was not physically impressive, he had long ago decided that none of his bodily flaws was serious enough to warrant wasting time having them corrected in a regen-tank.

“Traditionalist?” Paul seemed surprised at the accusation. “Hardly! But a rose is a rose is a rose, dammit. It should look like one and smell like one. Now the only varieties growing here are pre-Intervention.”

“Good for you,” said Catherine. “The plant engineers for the big nurseries seem to think that the more outlandish the flowers are, the better. There were roses in the catalog last fall that were the size of dinner plates, with more colors in each flower than a stained-glass window. They call them Chartres hybrids. Ridiculous.”

“Just part of the general trend toward the baroque and outré,” Maurice remarked. “Flowers, clothing, vehicles, music … all kinds of things getting more and more intricate and fussy. Some popular-culture theorists think it’s a reaction against the austerity of the Simbiari Proctorship years.”

Catherine nodded. She was tall and blonde like Maurice, Severin, and Anne, but without the studied judiciousness of the first, the panache of the second, or the cool intellectuality of the third. She often seemed to be the most vulnerable of the Dynasty, passionate in her opinions and imperious in manner, but paradoxically chilled by melancholy, never able to forget that her late son Gordon McAllister had been exposed as one unit of the Hydra who had killed her beloved husband, the boy’s own father. When the Human Magnates of the Concilium were finally able to assume a lighter administrative work load, Catherine Remillard had once again taken up her original profession of clinical metapsychology, the work she had once shared with
Brett McAllister. She was now acknowledged to be one of the principal latency research scholars in the Polity.

“I rather like the new Regency look in men’s clothing,” she said. “Those buckskin breeches and hussar boots are very dashing on you, Sevvy.”

“Oh, well,” muttered Severin, a trifle sheepishly. But he kicked at an imaginary pebble in the grass to make the boot-tassels swing.

“Better watch out, Paul.” Adrien’s sardonic smile was almost phosphorescent in the deepening dusk. “You’ll find yourself displaced as First Fashion Plate of the Polity if Sevvy gets any more gorgeous.”