Intervention

PROLOGUE

Hanover, New Hampshire, Earth
17 February 2113

The proverbial February thaw did not materialize for the 203rd annual Dartmouth Winter Carnival, and the temperature was around –10° Celsius when Uncle Rogi Remillard emerged from the sanctuary of the Peter Christian Tavern into a blustery, festive night. Cheered by a late supper of turkey-apple soup and a Vermont cheddar omelette, not to mention a liberal intake of spirits, he was damned if he would let the Family Ghost keep him from the fireworks display. The thing couldn’t possibly do anything blatant in the midst of such a mob.

The northeast wind blew leftover snow about thronged Main Street and down the tavern’s stairwell. Rogi had to push past revellers who tried to crowd down the steps as he climbed up. When the full blast caught him, he gave his long red-wool muffler an extra twist to wrap it partially about his head. Thick grizzled hair stuck out of the scarf folds like a scraggly fright wig. Uncle Rogi was tall, skinny, and slightly stooped. His youthful face was disfigured by great bags under the eyes and a slightly mashed nose, which dripped when forced to inhale the arctic air of unmodified New Hampshire winters. More fastidious Remillards had long since given up pleading with Rogi to fix himself up. The family image? Ça ne chie pas!

He stood in the partial shelter of the tavern building and looked warily around. The melting grids for both the streets and sidewalks of downtown Hanover had been turned off to preserve a properly old-fashioned atmosphere for the celebration. A six-horse team pulling a snow-roller had tamped down the worst ruts; and now sleighs, farm wagons full of hay and carousing students, and chuffing antique autos equipped with antique tire chains drove towards the College Green in anticipation of the pyrotechnics display. No modern vehicles were in sight. One could imagine it was the 1990s again . . . except that, among the human pedestrians in their reproduction winter gear from L. L. Bean and Eddie Bauer were slower-moving groups of exotic tourists from the nonhuman worlds of the Galactic Milieu. All but the hardy little Poltroyans were snugly sealed inside environmental suits with visors closed against the harsh Earth weather. The Poltroyans romped and chortled in the stinging cold, and wore fish-fur mukluks and oversized Dartmouth souvenir sweatshirts over their traditional robes.

Rogi searched the night, using his watering eyes rather than his farscan ultrasense. The damn Ghost was too clever a screener to be spotted with the mind’s eye – or at least his mind’s eye. Perhaps the thing had given up and gone away. God, he hoped so! After leaving him in peace for thirty years it had given him a nasty shock, accosting him there in the bookshop just as he was getting ready to close up. He had fled out into the street and it had followed, importuning him, all the way to the Peter Christian Tavern.

‘Are you still here, mon fantôme?’ Rogi muttered into his scarf. ‘Or did it get too cold for you, waiting outside? Silly thing. Who’d notice a ghost in a crowded bar with mulled cider and hot buttered rum flowing like Ammonoosuc Falls? Who’d notice a dozen ghosts?’

Something insubstantial stirred in the tiny plaza fronting the Nugget Cinema just south of the tavern. Whirling powder snow seemed for a moment to slide over and around a certain volume of empty air.

Bon sang! It had waited for him, all right. Rogi farspoke it:

Hello again. Beats me, Ghost, why you don’t simply put on a psychocreative body and sit down to supper with me like a civilized being. Other Lylmik do it.

The Ghost said: There are too many alumni operants in the Peter Christian tonight. Even a Grand Master or two. In their cups, the older ones might be unpredictably insightful.

‘And that would never do, eh? Some really big operator might see through you in the worst way!’ Rogi’s whisper was scathing and his mental façade, fortified with Dutch courage, no longer betrayed a hint of unease. ‘Well, I’m going over to watch the fireworks. How about you?’

The mysterious presence drifted closer, exuding restrained coercion. Oh, yes – it could force its will on him any time it liked; the fact that it didn’t had ominous implications. It needed wholehearted cooperation in some scheme again, the sneaky bastard, and very likely over some considerable span of time. Fat chance!

The Ghost’s mind-voice was insistent: We must talk.

‘Talk between skyrockets,’ Rogi told it rudely. ‘Nobody invited you here tonight. I’ve been waiting for this all winter. Why should I give up my fun?’

He turned his back and set off into the crowd. Nothing restrained him physically or mentally, but he was aware of the thing following. Bells in the Baker Library tower struck ten. A brass band was playing ‘Eleazar Wheelock’ over in front of the brilliantly lit Hanover Inn. The leafless branches of the ancient elms, maples and locust trees around the snowy quadrangle were trimmed in twinkling starlights. Streetlamps had been dimmed so the pseudo flames of the energy torches set up around the campus were the major source of illumination. They cast a mellow glow over the cheerful waiting throng and the ranks of huge snow sculptures in front of the college residence halls. In this centennial year of the Great Intervention, whimsical takeoffs on Milieu themes predominated. There was a flying saucer with its Simbiari crew marching down the gangplank, each exotic carrying a bucket of frozen green Jell-O. A hideous effigy of a Krondaku held out a tentacle to take a candy cane from a smiling human snow-child. Gi engaged in their favourite pursuit were posed in a Kama Sutra ensemble. Sigma Kappa had produced Snow White and the Seven Poltroyans. Out in the middle of the College Green was the festival’s monumental theme sculpture: a bizarre armoured humanoid like a fairy-tale knight, astride a rampant charger that was almost – but not quite – a horse. This statue was almost eight metres high.

The Ghost observed: A fair likeness of Kuhal, but the chaliko’s a bit off the mark.

‘The Outing Club tried to get him to be grand marshal of the cross-country ski parade,’ Rogi said, ‘but Cloud put her foot down. Spoil-sport. And you can’t fool me, Ghost. I know why you showed up tonight instead of some other time. You wanted to see the Winter Carnival yourself.’ He groped inside his disreputable old blanket-coat and found a leather-bound flask of Wild Turkey.

There was a choong from a cleared area over beyond Wentworth Street. The first rocket went up and burst in an umbrella of pink, silver and blue tinsel extending from horizon to horizon. The crowd yelled and applauded. Rogi moved into the lee of a giant elm trunk to escape the wind. He held out the flask. ‘Une larme de booze?’

Nobody noticed when the container left his gloved hand, tilted in the air, and then returned to its owner.

Good stuff, said the Family Ghost.

‘As if a damned alien Lylmik would know,’ Rogi retorted. ‘Gotcha!’ He took three hefty swallows.

Still seeking solace in the bottle instead of the Unity, I see.

‘What’s it to you?’ Rogi drank again.

I love you. I wish you joy and peace.

‘So you always said . . . just before you gave me a new load of shit to shovel.’ He took another snort, capped the flask, and put it away. The expression on his face as he watched scarlet fire-flowers bloom above black branches was both cunning and reckless. ‘Level with me. What are you, really? A living person or just a manifestation of my own superego?’

The Ghost sighed and said: We’re not going to start that all over again, are we?

‘You’re the one who started it – by coming back to bug me.’

Don’t be afraid of me, Rogi. I know there were difficult times in the past—

‘Damn right! Least you can do is satisfy my curiosity, settle my mind before you start in all over again with the botheration. Put on an astral body like your damn Lylmik compères. Show yourself!’

No.

Rogi gave a derisive sniff. He took a bandanna handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his nose. ‘It figures. You’re not a real Lylmik anymore than you’re a real ghost.’ Windchill tears blurred the purple and orange comets that chased each other overhead like she-elves with their hair on fire.

The Ghost said: I am a Lylmik. I am the entity charged with the guidance of the Family Remillard through your agency, just as I’ve always claimed to be. And now I come to you with one last task—

‘Shit – I knew it!’ Rogi howled in mortal anguish. Three stunning detonations from aerial bombs announced a flock of golden pinwheels. They zoomed heavenward in a tight formation, fissioned into hundreds of small replicas of themselves, then rained down towards the skeletal treetops, whirling and whistling like demented birds. There were vocal and telepathic cheers from the crowd. The brass band in front of the inn played louder. Metapsychic operants among the students were mind-shouting the final verse of the old college song with drunken exuberance:

‘All my life,’ Rogi moaned, ‘haunted by a damn exotic busybody masquerading as the Family Ghost. Why me? Just a quiet man, not very clever, hardly any metabilities worth mentioning. No world-shaker, just a harmless bookseller. Most insignificant member of the high and mighty Remillard Dynasty. Why me? Persecuted! Pushed around without any common consideration. Forced into one dangerous situation after another just to carry out your damn Lylmik schemes and forward the manifest destiny of humanity . . . unless it all hatched in my own unconscious.’

Like starry dandelion puffs, colossal pompoms of Dartmouth green and white exploded high over the Old Row. The wind strengthened, stirring more and more snow into the air.

Patiently, the Ghost said: You and your family were the key that opened the Galactic Milieu to the human race. The work required an exotic mentor because of the psychosocial immaturity of Earth’s people and the pivotal role of you Remillards. And while I admit that you were called upon to endure mental and physical hardship—

‘You should be ashamed, using me that way. Playing goddam God.’ Rogi gave a maudlin snuffle. He had the flask out again and emptied it with a single pull. ‘Nobody ever knew I was the one – your catspaw. Always another pot you wanted stirred, another piece of manipulation, meddling with this Remillard or that one. Uncle Rogi, galactic agent provocateur! And you used every dirty trick in the book to keep me in line, tu bâton merdeux.’

The Ghost said: Your family would have been aware if we had tried to coerce them, and they never would have accepted direct counsel from nonhumans – especially in the pre-Intervention years. We had to work through you. You were the perfect solution. And you survived.

A cascade of white fire poured from the sky behind the library, silhouetting its lovely Georgian Revival tower. Psychokinetic adepts among the spectators took hold of the falling sparks and formed them into Greek letters and other emblems of college fellowship. The crystal dust of the blown snow began to mix with heavier flakes running ahead of the predicted storm.

Rogi’s eyes glittered with fresh moisture. ‘Yes, I survived it all. A hundred and sixty-eight winters and still going strong. But good old Denis had to die before he ever reached Unity, and Paul and his poor Teresa . . . and Jack! My Ti-Jean, the one you exotics call a saint – for what good it does him. You could have prevented all their deaths, and the billions of deaths in the Rebellion! You could have had me warn Marc, shown me some way to stop him. You could have used me properly, you cold-hearted monster, and nipped the conspiracy in the bud before it ever came to war!’

The Ghost said: It had to happen as it happened. And in your own heart, Rogatien Remillard, you know that the tragedies brought about a greater good.

‘Not for Marc! Not for poor Marc the damned one. Why did he have to end that way? My little boy! I think he loved me more than his own father – nearly as much as he loved Ti-Jean. He almost grew up in my bookstore. My God, he teethed on a mint copy of Otto Willi Gail’s By Rocket to the Moon!’

The Ghost said: So he did . . . I remember watching him.

‘And yet you stood by and let him become the greatest mass murderer in human history – that brilliant misguided man who could have done so much good, if only you’d guided him instead of using an impotent old fart like me as your puppet.’

The fireworks were reaching a crescendo. Great jets of vermilion fire rose from the four points of the compass behind the trees and nearly converged overhead. In the dark at the zenith, in the midst of the glare, there appeared a dazzling white star. It vibrated and split in two and the paired lights began to orbit a common centre drawing intricate figures like laser projections. The stars split again and again; each set drew more detailed designs about the central focus until the sky was covered with a blazing mandala, a magical pattern of spinning wheels within ornate wheels, white tracery in ever-changing motion.

Then it froze. It was fire-lace for a moment, then broke into fine shards of silver that still held the wondrous pattern. The night was webbed in a giant constellation of impossible intricacy. Down on the campus the crowd released a pent-up breath. The tiny diamond-points faded to darkness. The show was over.

Uncle Rogi shivered and pulled his muffler tighter. People were hurrying away in all directions now, fleeing the cold. The band finished playing ‘The Winter Song’ and withdrew into the shelter of the Hanover Inn, there to drink the health of Eleazar Wheelock and many another Dartmouth worthy. Sleigh bells jingled, the wind roared in the white pines, and fresh falling snow curtained off the tall sculpture of the Tanu knight on the Dartmouth College Green.

‘Whatever you want,’ Rogi told the Ghost, ‘I won’t do it.’

He darted off across rutted Wheelock Street, dodging a Model A Ford, a wasp-coloured Ski-Doo, and a replica post-coach of 1820 vintage carrying a party of riotous Poltroyans.

The unseen presence dogged Rogi’s heels. It said: This is the centennial year of the Intervention, 2113, and a year significant in other ways as well.

‘Et alors?’ sneered Rogi loftily. He headed back on Main Street alongside the hotel.

The Ghost was cajoling: You must undertake this last assignment, and then I promise you that these visitations will end . . . if at the end you wish it so.

‘The devil you say!’ The bookseller came to a sudden stop on the brightly lit sidewalk. There were roisterers all around, shouting to one another and filling the aether with farspoken nonsense. The celebrating students and visitors ignored Rogi and he in turn shut out all perception of them as he strained his mental vision to get a clear view of his tormentor. As always, he failed. Frustration brought new tears to his eyes. He addressed the Ghost on its intimate mode:

Thirty goddam years! Yes, thirty years now you’ve let me alone, only to come back and say you want to start all over again. I suppose it’s to do with Hagen and Cloud. Well, I won’t help you manipulate those poor young folks – not even if you bring a whole planeful of Lylmiks to lay siege to my bookshop. You exotics don’t know how stubborn an Earthling can be till you try to cross an old Canuck! To hell with you and your last assignment – et va te faire foutre!

The Ghost laughed. And the laugh was so different from its characteristic dispassionate expressions of amusement, so warm, so nearly human, that Rogi felt his fear and antagonism waver. He was overcome by a peculiar sense of déjà vu.

Then he was startled to discover that they had already reached South Street and were just across from The Eloquent Page, his bookshop. In this part of town, away from the college buildings and drinking establishments, the sidewalks were nearly deserted. The historic Gates House, with his shop on the first-floor corner and the white clapboard of the upper storeys blending into the thickening storm, had only a single lighted window in the north dormer: the sitting room of his third-floor apartment. He hustled up the steps into the entry on Main Street, pulled off a glove, and thumbed the warm, glowing key-pad of the lock. The outer door swung open. He looked over his shoulder into the swirling snow. The laughter of the Ghost still rang in his mind.

‘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 pseudo flames 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 grey cat 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 see 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 vigour, 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.