"May, Julian - Galactic Milieu 3 - Magnificat" - читать интересную книгу автора (May Julian)

"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 that 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.
"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."

1
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

I flew home to New England on auto-vee the next day, sleeping most of the way with my cat curled up beside me on the rear banquette. Oddly enough, I didn't have bad dreams after the interview with Marc's son and daughter, for which I suppose I can thank Malama Johnson. God knows, I would never be able to think of Marc--or the Family Ghost--in the same way again after the horrors that poor Cloud and Hagen disclosed to me back on Kauai.
I woke up, feeling fairly decent, as the egg announced that we were nearly home and demanded further navigational instructions. We traced a leisurely holding pattern 1200 meters above Hanover, New Hampshire. It was a lovely morning and the old college town by the Connecticut River was at its most charming, spread out below like a patchwork quilt of bright colors thanks to the autumn foliage.
I discovered that I was ravenously hungry. Half a dozen congenial campus eateries lay within strolling distance of my apartment, and I had opened my mouth to give the command to descend-- when suddenly a completely different notion on where to break my fast occurred to me.
Sheer serendipity.
Right.
I programmed the aircraft for Vee-flight to Bretton Woods, and a few minutes later we'd whizzed 90 kilometers northeast and descended into the egg-park area of the old White Mountain Resort Hotel. It crouched at the foot of Mount Washington, a gargantuan white wooden confection with bright red roofs on its gabled wings and quaint towers. As the rhocraft landed, I announced myself over the RF com and confirmed that the establishment would be delighted to accommodate Citizen Remillard for breakfast.
I opaqued the egg's dome for decency's sake, used the facilities, freshened up with a Beard-Wipe, combed my hair, and donned my old corduroy jacket. Then I opened a pouch of cat food for Marcel and thrust him into his carrier-cage. He bespoke telepathic indignation as he realized I was about to go off and leave him behind.
"Sorry, old boy. No companion animals allowed in the hotel dining room. Old Yankee custom."
Marcel gave a bitter hiss of betrayal as I exited the rhocraft Silly brute. When were the goddam cats going to admit that the raison d'ъtre of the human race was not humble service to felinity?
I came through the gardens, where chrysanthemums and dahlias and winter pansies still bloomed, and ambled into the hotel's main entrance, giving my nostalgia free rein as I sopped up the familiar Edwardian ambiance. I hadn't been here in thirty years, but the old place, beautifully restored, subtly tricked out now with high-tech innovations to allow year-round operation and adapted to accommodate other races besides humankind, looked almost exactly as I remembered it. The lobby was crowded with tourists, both human and exotic, many of them preparing to ascend Mount Washington via the antique cog railway.
I went out on the veranda, where there was a gorgeous view of the Presidential Range, not yet touched by snow. The lower slopes were a blazing mosaic of dark evergreens and gold-and-scarlet sugar maples.
Memories overwhelmed me like a psychic avalanche. The wedding of Jack and Dorothщe had been held here in 2078, and I'd been the ring-bearer and killed a man for the second time in my life. And in 2082, the last time I had stood on the mountain, my nephew Denis had been with me.
Denis. And the other.
But I dared not think of that yet. So I went in and had a fine breakfast, then returned to my egg, where Marcel had retaliated against my perfidy in the time-honored catty fashion. I didn't even bother to chide him, only turned on the aircraft's environmental deodorizer full-blast and flew home. It was time to begin writing again, with or without the Family Ghost's help.

It was more than happenstance that brought me back to the White Mountain Hotel.
In my younger days, before opening the bookshop, I worked at the place as a convention manager. My nephew Denis, who adopted me as his father figure when my twin brother Don let him down, first visited the hotel in 1974 when he was seven years old. We rode the smoke-belching cog train to the summit of Mount Washington together, and it was there that the boy and I first met Elaine Donovan and made the joyous discovery that there were other people on Earth with operant higher mindpowers besides ourselves.