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PROLOGUE

Kauai, Hawaii, Earth

27 October 2113

It was dawn on the islands. In the ohia thickets of the highland forest, apapane birds and thrushes gave a few drowsy chirps as they tuned up for their sunrise aubade. Inside a rustic house on the mountainside above Shark Rock, the old bookseller called Uncle Rogi Remillard yawned and stopped dictating into his transcriber. He looked out of the big sitting-room window at the dark, choppy Pacific nearly a thousand metres below, pinched the bridge of his long, broken nose, and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment while he gathered his thoughts. The adjacent isle of Niihau was just becoming visible against the rose-gray sky and a few lights in Kekaha village sparkled down along the Kauai shore.

Uncle Rogi was a lanky man with a head of untidy grizzled curls and a face that was deeply tanned after a three-month stay on the islands. He wore a garish aloha shirt and rumpled chinos, and he was dead tired after an all-night session of work on his memoirs, so close to finishing the volume that he couldn’t bear to break off and go to bed.

Now only the final page remained.

He picked up the transcriber’s input microphone again, cleared his throat, and began to record.

Rogi studied the transcriber’s display. Not bad. Not a bad windup at all! He yawned again.

His ten-kilo Maine Coon cat Marcel LaPlume IX stalked into the room and uttered a faint, high-pitched miaow. Rogi acknowledged the animal’s telepathic greeting with a weary nod. ‘Eh bien, mon brave chaton. All done with this chunk of family history. Only the worst part left to tell. One more book. Shall we stay here on Kauai and do it, or go back to New Hampshire?’

Marcel levitated onto the desk and sat beside the transcriber, regarding his master with enormous grey-green eyes. He said: Hot here. Go home.

Rogi chuckled. Hale Pohakumano was actually situated high enough to be spared the worst of the tropical heat and humidity. But the cat’s shaggy grey-black pelt and big furry feet had been designed by nature for snowy northern climes, and even the joys of chasing geckos and picking fights with jungle cocks had finally paled for him.

Home, Marcel said again, fixing Rogi with an owl-like coercive stare.

‘Batége, maybe you’re right.’ The bookseller picked up the silver correction stylo, tapped the display and dictated a final word, changing ‘planet Caledonia’ on the last page to ‘Callie.’ Then he hit the FILE and PRINT pads of the transcriber. ‘Yep, I guess it’s time to get on back to Hanover – make sure the bookshop’s okay, enjoy the last of the autumn leaves. And put my stupid wishful thinking in the ashcan where it belongs. There’s no reason to stay here. I’ve got to stop acting like a sentimental sap.’

Marcel inclined his head in silent agreement.

‘She’s just not going to show up. Haunani and Tony must have let her know I was staying in her house. If she’d wanted to see me, she had plenty of chances to drop in, casual-like.’

Rogi looked out the window again, letting his inefficient seekersense sift through the human auras glimmering far down-slope. The residents and holiday-makers in Kekaha village were mostly still asleep, their minds unguarded so that even a metapsychic searcher as clumsy as he was could sort through their identities quickly.

None of those minds belonged to Elaine Donovan, the woman he had loved and lost 139 years ago.

The farsensory search was a futile gesture, bien sûr, and he didn’t bother to check out any of the other towns. Elaine was probably nowhere near the Hawaiian Islands – perhaps not even on the planet Earth.

Borrowing her house while he wrote the penultimate volume of his memoirs had been a bummer of an idea after all, even though the Family Ghost had colluded in it and mysteriously made all the arrangements. Rogi really had thought it wouldn’t matter, sleeping in Elaine’s bed, cooking in her kitchen, eating off the tableware she’d used, mooching around the garden of tropical flowers she’d planted.

But it had mattered.

Rogi had seen her image on the Tri-D and in durofilm newsprint rather often in recent years, for she was a distinguished patron of the arts, both human and exotic. The rejuvenation techniques of the Galactic Milieu had preserved her beauty. She retained the same silvery eyes, strawberry-blonde hair, and striking features that had left him thunderstruck at their first meeting in 1974.

He had no idea whether or not she still wore Bal à Versailles perfume.

Long ago, his pig-headed pride had made marriage impossible and they had gone their separate ways. He had loved other women since their parting but none of them were her equal. Elaine Donovan, the grandmother of Teresa Kendall and the great-grandmother of Marc Remillard and his mutant younger brother Jack.

The Hawaiian couple who served as caretakers for her house told Rogi that Elaine hadn’t visited the place for over three years. But that wasn’t unusual, they said. She was a busy woman. One day she’d return to Hale Pohakumano . . .

The transcriber gave a soft bleep and produced a neat stack of infinitely recyclable plass pages. Like most people, Rogi still called the stuff paper. He riffled through the printout, skimming over Dorothea Macdonald’s early life, the challenges she had overcome, her great triumph, her eventual recognition of a very unlikely soul-mate.

‘Gotta go into that a tad more thoroughly,’ he said to himself. ‘C’est que’q’chose – what a bizarre pair of saints they were! Little Diamond Mask and Jack the Bodiless.’ He thought about them, smiling as his eyes roved over the final page.

But his reverie evaporated as he reached the last line. He was suddenly wide awake with something horrid stirring deep in his gut.

‘No, goddammit! I can’t get away with a happy ending. I’m supposed to be telling the whole truth about our family.’ He grabbed the mike, barked out a concluding sentence, then reprinted the page and read what he had produced.

Pain tightened Rogi’s face. He slammed the durofilm sheet down on the desk, mouthed an obscenity in Canuckois dialect, and sat with his head lowered for a moment before looking up towards the ceiling. ‘And you say you didn’t have any idea who Fury was, mon fantôme?’

Marcel the cat flinched, skinning his ears back, but he held his ground. Rogi wasn’t talking to him and he was used to his master’s eccentric soliloquies.

‘You really didn’t know the monster’s identity?’ the old man bellowed furiously at the empty air. ‘Well, why the hell not? You Lylmik are supposed to be the almighty Overlords of the Galactic Milieu, aren’t you? If you didn’t know, it’s because you deliberately chose not to!’

There was silence, except for the dawn chorus of the birds.

Muttering under his breath, Rogi pulled a key-ring from his trouser pocket and lurched to his feet. A gleaming fob resembling a small ball of red glass enclosed in a metal cage caught the light from the desklamp. He shook the bunch of old-fashioned keys provocatively.

‘Talk to me, Ghost! Answer the questions. If you want me to finish up these memoirs, you better get your invisible ass down to Earth and start explaining why you didn’t prevent all that bad shit! Not just the Fury thing, but the Mental Man fiasco and the war as well. Why did you let it happen? God knows you meddled and manipulated us enough earlier in the game.’

The Family Ghost remained silent.

Rogi crumpled back into the chair and pressed his brow with the knuckles of his tightened fists. The cat jumped lightly into his. lap and butted his head against his master’s chest.

Go home, Marcel said.

‘Le fantôme familier won’t talk to me,’ the old man remarked sadly. He tugged at the cat’s soft ears and scratched his chin. Marcel began to purr. Rogi’s brief spate of wakefulness was fading and he felt an overwhelming fatigue. ‘The Great Carbuncle always rousted the bastard out before. What the hell’s the matter with him? He hasn’t been around prompting me in weeks.’

He’s busy, said a voice in his mind. An’ not feelin’ so good. He come back laytah an’ kokua when you really need ’im.

‘Who’s that?’ Rogi croaked, starting up from the chair.

It’s me brah. Malama. I got da word from yo’ Lylmik spook eh? Someting you gotta do fo’ you go mainland.

‘Oh, shit. Haven’t I had enough grief?’

Hanakokolele Rogue! Try trust yo’ akamai tutu. Dis gonna be plenny good fo’ da kine memoirs. Firs’ ting yo’ catch some moemoe den egg on ovah my place. Da Mo’i Lylmik wen send special visitors. It say dey gone clarify few tings li’ dat fo’ yo’ write summore.

‘Who the hell are these visitors?’

Come down aftanoon fine out. Now sleep. Aloha oe mo’opuna.

‘Malama? . . . Malama?’ Rogi spoke a last feeble epithet. Why was his Hawaiian friend being so damned mysterious? What was the Family Ghost up to now, using the kahuna woman as a go-between?

Sleep, urged Marcel. He jumped down from the desk and headed out of the room, pausing to look back over his shoulder.

‘Ah, bon, bon,’ the old man growled in surrender.

Outside, the sky had turned to gold and wild roosters were crowing in the ravines. Rogi turned off the desklamp and the transcriber and shuffled after the cat. The keyring with the Great Carbuncle, forgotten, lay on the desk looking very ordinary except for a wan spark of light at the heart of the red fob, reminiscent of a similar, more sinister object buried in Spain.

Rogi slept poorly, plagued by dreams of the Fury monster and its homicidal minion, Hydra. Roused by the pillow alarm at 1400 hours, he slapped shave on his face, showered, put on fresh slacks and a more subdued shirt, and went out to the egg parked on the landing pad at the edge of the garden.

Tony Opelu was trimming a hibiscus hedge with a brushzapper. He waved. ‘Howzit, Rogi! Goin’ to town? Try bring back couple E-cells fo’ da Jeep, eh? She wen die on me this mornin’.’

‘No trouble at all.’

‘T’anks, eh? Howza book goin’?’

‘Just finished the chunk I was working on. I’ll be taking off for the mainland tomorrow, leave you and Haunani in peace. It’s been a real pleasure being here, but I’ve got a hankering for home.’

‘It happens,’ Tony conceded.

‘I’ll leave a note for Elaine. Give her my best when you see her again.’ Rogi climbed into the ovoid rhocraft, lit up, and lofted slowly into the air under inertialess power.

Rainclouds shrouded the uplands, but the lower slopes of Kauai were in full sunlight. He flew across Waimea Canyon, a spectacular gash in the land that Mark Twain had compared to a miniaturized version of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Beyond were dark lava cliffs, gullies carved in scarlet laterite soil, and lush green ridges with glittering streams and the occasional waterfall. He flew on manual, heading southeast, descending over lowland jungles that had once been flourishing canefields. Some sugar was still grown on the island, but most of the local people now earned a living catering to tourists. There were also colonies of artists and writers on Kauai, enclaves of retired folks who scorned rejuvenation and intended to die in paradise, two cooperatives dedicated to the preservation of island culture that staged immersive pageants, and a few metapsychic practitioners who specialized in the huna ‘magic’ of ancient Polynesia.

Malama Johnson was one of those.

Her picturesque house, deceptively modest on the outside, was in Kukuiula Bay, a few kilometres west of the resort town of Poipu, not far from the place where Jon Remillard and Dorothea Macdonald had resided when they were on Earth. There were no other eggs on the pad behind Malama’s place, but a sporty green Lotus groundcar with a discreet National logo on the windscreen was parked in the shade of a silk-oak tree next to her elderly Toyota pickup.

Rogi disembarked from his rhocraft and tried farsensing the interior of the house. But Malama had put up an opaque barrier to such spying, and his mind’s ear heard her scolding him in the Pidgin dialect that Hawaiians loved to use among their intimates.

Wassamatta you peephead? Fo’get all yo’ mannahs o’ wot? E komo mai wikiwiki!

With a shamefaced grin, he knocked on the rear screen-door and came into the empty kitchen. ‘Aloha, tutu!’

Malama Johnson called out in perfectly modulated Standard English. ‘We’re in the lanai, Rogi. Come join us!’

He passed through the cool, beautifully appointed rooms to a shaded porch at the other end of the house. It was dim and fragrant, with a fine view of the sea. The stout kahuna woman bounced up and embraced him, kissing him on both cheeks. She wore a royal blue muumuu and several leis of rare tiny golden shells from Niihau. ‘Cloud and Hagen flew in last night from San Francisco,’ she said, indicating the two guests.

Rogi swallowed his astonishment. ‘Hey. Nice to see you again.’

The fair-haired young man and woman nodded at him but remained seated in their rattan chairs, sipping from tall tumblers of iced fruit juice. They were immaculately attired; she in a snowy cotton safari suit and high white buckskin moccasins, he in a LaCoste shirt, white slacks and white Top-Siders. Rogi knew the visitors, all right, but no better than any other members of the Remillard family did. They were still very reclusive and reticent about their early lives. Their presence here on Kauai under these peculiar circumstances was a considerable shock to the old man.

He took a seat at Malama’s urging. On the low koawood table was a tray holding an untouched dish of pupus – Hawaiian snacks – and two beverage pitchers, one half-empty, one full. Pouring from the latter, the kahuna offered a glass to Rogi. The drink had a sizable percentage of rum and he gulped it thankfully as he eyed the young people. They were in their late twenties. A remote smile touched the lips of Cloud Remillard as she looked out at the sea. Her brother Hagen was blank-faced, making no pretense of cordiality.

Rogi ventured an awkward attempt at heartiness. ‘So the Family Ghost put the arm on you two kids to collaborate in the memoirs, eh?’

Hagen Remillard’s reply was chill and formal, and every aspect of his mind was inviolably shielded. ‘We were bespoken by a Lylmik wearing the usual disembodied head manifestation. He ordered us to come here and talk to you about certain events that took place during our exile in the Pliocene Epoch.’

‘That . . . should be mighty interesting.’ Rogi’s grin was wary.

‘You know that our entire group was debriefed by the Human Polity Science Directorate when we first came through the time-gate.’ Hagen did not meet the old bookseller’s eyes. ‘At that time we were instructed not to publicize details of our Pliocene experiences, and we complied scrupulously. Even now, very few people know that the two of us were among the returnees.’

‘It was a relief, having an official excuse to keep quiet about our identities,’ Cloud said. ‘We knew that if the public were spared the more gaudy details of our prehistoric adventures, there would be less likelihood of our lives becoming a media circus. In most of the Milieu, our group was just a nine days’ wonder. You know: Time Travellers Return! Whoop-dee-doo . . . then on to the next bit of fast-breaking news. My husband Kuhal had a harder time of it, but at least he’s humanoid and so he adapted. We’ve been kept busy doing certain work connected with our conditional Unification and we’ve managed to live more or less in peace – until now.’

Hagen said, ‘The entity who countermanded the Directorate’s gag order told us that he was Atoning Unifex, the head of the Milieu’s Supervisory Body. Cloud and I were properly overawed at first. But as the Lylmik spoke to us we both experienced a shocking sense of déjà vu. After Unifex vanished we were confused – no, we were terrified! – and we wondered if we had experienced some shared delusion, a waking nightmare. Not long afterward, the Lylmik’s orders to us were reconfirmed by the First Magnate of the Human Polity and also by the Intendant General of Earth. Both women took some pains to tell us what an extraordinary communication we’d been honored with.’ The young man’s face was sardonic. ‘That was a considerable understatement.’

‘We agreed to come here and talk to you only after it became evident that we would be coerced if we refused,’ Cloud added. Her voice was low-pitched, but warm and without rancour. ‘We’ve had quite enough of that already in our lives.’

‘Did you recognize Unifex, then?’ Rogi asked softly. ‘Do you know who he really is?’

‘I knew almost immediately,’ said Cloud. ‘I was always closer to him than my brother. The realization was . . . shattering. Hagen didn’t want to believe it.’

‘Unifex is Marc Remillard,’ Rogi said. ‘Your father.’

‘Damn him!’ Hagen exploded to his feet and began striding about the lanai like a caged catamount. ‘We were so relieved when the time-gate closed after us and the Milieu authorities obliterated the site! Cloud and I and all the rest of us thought we were finally free. Papa was trapped six million years in the past along with that madman Aiken Drum, and he could never hurt us again.’

‘He never meant to be cruel,’ Cloud murmured.

Hagen rounded on her. ‘He never thought of us as thinking, feeling human beings at all. We were nothing but subjects in his grand experiment.’ He turned to Rogi and Malama. ‘Do you know what his gang of decrepit Rebel survivors called him behind his back? Abaddon – the Angel of the Abyss! At the end, almost all of them repudiated him and his lunatic plan for Mental Man.’

‘Papa gave it up, too,’ Cloud insisted. ‘Or he would never have sent us back through the time-gate.’

Hagen’s rage seemed suddenly extinguished, leaving hopelessness. He slumped back into his chair. ‘Now we discover that our father won out after all. Not only did he miraculously survive for six million years but somehow he also managed to transmute himself into the Overlord of the Galactic Milieu! God help us and our children.’ He lifted hate-filled eyes to Rogi and Malama. ‘God help all of you.’

‘Unifex atoned,’ the Hawaiian woman said serenely. ‘During all those endless years he tried to make restitution for his crimes. He performed his penance not only in this galaxy, but in the other one – where the Tanu and Firvulag people came from. I know almost nothing about his Pliocene activities and his later accomplishments in Duat, but everything he’s done for the races of the Milky Way has been for the good. He founded the Milieu and guided it every step of the way. Thanks to him there are six coadunate racial Minds secure in Unity – and thousands more nearly ready to join the Galactic Confederation.’

‘Too bad he didn’t do a better job shepherding his old home planet,’ Hagen said bitterly, ‘preventing natural disasters,’ plagues, famines, wars – to say nothing of the Metapsychic Rebellion. His Lylmik self just stood idly by while his earlier self nearly destroyed galactic civilization.’

Malama only smiled. ‘The greatest spatiotemporal nodalities are immutable and the past, present, and future form a seamless whole. It is impossible to change history. Unifex acted as he must act – and yet his actions were and are freely done. Our own actions are free as well, contributing to and formulating the mystery of the Great Reality.’

Hagen gave a scornful laugh. ‘And “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world”?’

‘Perhaps,’ Malama said.

They sat in silence for several minutes. Then Hagen spoke again. ‘Something’s just occurred to me. The Lylmik race is the closest thing to Mental Man that our galaxy has produced, but it’s decadent and headed for extinction. What do you want to bet that Papa tried to modify Lylmik evolution just as he wanted to modify ours – and failed!’

Rogi shrugged. ‘Nobody knows a damn thing about Lylmik history.’

‘Maybe,’ the young man continued slowly, ‘Papa plans to return to his original scheme now that he’s six million years wiser after the fact . . . and he has his original experimental subjects back in hand.’

‘Don’t talk like a fool,’ Cloud cried out to her brother. ‘The Galactic Concilium would never permit the Mental Man project to be revived – not even by the arch-Lylmik himself.’

‘Would you bet your life on it?’ Hagen shot back at her. ‘Again?’

‘I can think of one sure way you two can help prevent it,’ Rogi said suddenly, ‘in the unlikely event that Hagen’s right.’

‘How?’ the brother and sister demanded together.

‘Tell me all you know about Marc’s scheme, and I’ll publish it in the fourth volume of my memoirs. The full story of Mental Man has never come out. Most of the details of the plan were suppressed by the Galactic Concilium – supposedly to preserve the tranquillity and good order of the Milieu.’

‘You were on the brink of the Metapsychic Rebellion then, weren’t you?’ Cloud asked.

‘Right. Officially, the Rebellion was fought to liberate humanity from the Milieu and its Unity. But the main reason Marc decided to declare war was because he was so pissed off at having his great dream condemned. He caused a monumental uproar when the Mental Man project was cancelled, charging that the exotic magnates and their loyalist human confederates were conspiring to deprive our race of a great genetic breakthrough. He said that the Milieu was afraid humanity would become mentally superior to all the rest of creation, and the only solution was breaking away, as the Rebel faction had advocated for so long. A lot of normals believed that the Mental Man project would insure that all their children would grow up to be metapsychic operants. But Marc and his people never did explain to the general public exactly how this miracle was going to be accomplished.’

‘He didn’t dare,’ Hagen muttered. ‘They would have lynched him.’

Cloud said, ‘It was years before Hagen and I finally discovered what Papa had planned. When our mother found out the truth . . . well, you know what happened.’

‘No, I don’t,’ Rogi said. ‘Not really. Tell me! Help me tell the story to the whole Galactic Milieu. That’s got to be the reason why you two were sent here to talk to me. I don’t understand why Unifex doesn’t give me the information himself, but he must have his reasons.’

‘It was his worst sin,’ Malama Johnson stated in her calm voice. ‘Worse than leading the Rebellion into violent conflict and causing the deaths of all those people. Deep in his heart, Marc thought the war against the Galactic Milieu and its Unity was justified, as his followers did. But the Mental Man project was quite different. He knew it was wrong, and yet he couldn’t resist the awful elegance of the concept – the opportunity to personally engineer a great leap forward in human mental and physical evolution.’

The three others stared at her wordlessly.

‘Don’t you see, dear grandchildren?’ Malama spread her hands, embracing all their minds in huna healing. ‘Unifex is too ashamed to talk about it. Even now.’