3. The energy was focused and amplified by means of a maneuver known as "metapsychic concert," in which numbers of operant brains act as one synergistically, the whole being capable of an output greater than the sum of the parts.
4. It was not possible to calculate with total accuracy the amount of energy focused upon the assassin, since its characteristics were anomalous. (For example, there were no auditory manifestations as there had been when the General Secretary's head was vaporized by the explosive device.) Furthermore, it was not possible to calculate the percentage of psychoenergy generated by individual delegates.
5. The metafaculty of psychocreativity, which may generate energy, is at present poorly understood. Except for the Weinstein case, there is no previous record of a fatality resulting from the projection of psychic energy. Metapsychic concert is also poorly understood. Its manifestation has been experimentally verified by magnetoenceph-alography; but in no instance have researchers ever encountered an effect even remotely approaching the magnitude of the Retributory Incident.
6. In the opinion of the investigatory committee, the Incident was the result of an unconscious velleity on the part of the delegate-minds, without true volition. In lay langauge, the delegates were so shocked and angered by the General Secretary's murder that their mutual loathing of the perpetrator generated the blast that killed him.
7. On the advice of the committee, no action at law against the delegate-perpetrators was contemplated by the Soviet judiciary. It was felt that the principle of diminished responsibility applied to their actions in view of the heinousness of the crime they had just witnessed.
8. Repetitions of Retributory Incidents could not be ruled out, given similar provocatory circumstances.
9. The committee recommended strongly that legal scholars, ethicists, and moral theologians address themselves to the unique problems of culpability devolving upon metapsychic operancy. The ancient question of whether the law should take the will for the deed would have to be reopened when, ipso facto, the will was the deed.
***
Debate over the philosophical and legal implications of operancy would beget an avalanche of articles, monographs, and books off and on over the next fifteen years, until the topic received its ultimate resolution in the Intervention. Of course Denis did not serve on the investigating committee. (The fact of his nonparticipation in the destructive metaconcert was proved when the Simbiari Proctorship reopened the inquiry into the Incident in 2017, at Denis's insistence.) Lucille, who had not attended the Sixth Congress because of her confinement with her first son, Philip, did serve. It should be noted that she laid open her personal psychocreative case history to assist the committee in its deliberations, an action that required great courage at the time. Fortunately for her, the committee decided that it was not necessary to include that history in the public record.
You, the entity reading these memoirs, should not get the impression that reaction to the Retributory Incident was as reasoned and high-minded as this chapter may have thus far implied. On the contrary, there was a royal rumpus kicked up in the United States, where the media hashed and rehashed the affair ad nauseam, bringing the term "psychozap" into slang usage, together with the pejorative "head," applied to operants—which was perversely embraced by us and later used as an innocent appellation. As the Third Millennium approached, cranks and fanatics of every sort crept out of the woodwork—most notably the Sons of Earth movement, which claimed worldwide adherents by 1999 and succeeded in disrupting part of the Eighth Metapsychic Congress in London.
The Great California Earthquake gave new life to the prophecies of Nostradamus. Never mind that the prophet's dating for the quake was so ambiguous that it might have referred to any century following the sixteenth, with the locale of the seismic disaster unspecified. Two other pertinent quatrains from Nostradamus were dusted off and presented to the gullible as portents of things to come:
L'an mil neuf cens nonante neuf sept mois,
Du ceil viendra un grand Roi deffraieur.
Resusciter le grand Roi d'Angolmois.
Avant que Mars regner par bonheur.
Apres grand troche humaine plus grande s'appreste,
Le grand moteur des Siecles renouvelle.
Pluie, sang, laict, famine, fer et peste
Au feu ciel veu courant longue estincelle.
Which can be roughly translated:
In the seventh month of the year 1999,
A great King of Terror will come.
He will revive the great King of the Mongols.
Before that Mars will run riot.
After great human suffering, even greater comes,
When the great motive power of the Centuries is renewed.
Rain, blood, milk, famine, iron [war], and disease
In the heavens is seen a fire, a long flow of sparks.
The hysterical could equate the new, bellicose leader of the Soviet Union, Marshal Kumylzhensky, with the King of Terror. By a long stretch of the imagination, the new Genghis Khan could be seen in the insurrections flaring up in Soviet Central Asia. (No one yet had any inkling that the Chinese were watching the accelerating dissolution of the USSR with keen interest.) The continued fighting throughout the Islamic world was certainly a source of suffering, and the crazy weather that had rotted the crops in some parts of the world while parching others also seemed to fit. As to the milk, there remained the legacy of the Armageddon fallout, poisoning both milk and "blood" in a wide swath of the Middle East and the Balkans for seven years now. The fateful Seventh Month of 1999 came and went without any signal disaster; but in August, the total eclipse of the sun that was visible in Europe, the most embattled regions of the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent wreaked havoc among the superstitious, who were certain that the end of the world had come. After that crisis had passed, there was another to be endured on ii November, when Earth passed through the great Leonid meteor "storm," a Nostradamic fiery flow of sparks if there ever was one. But once again Earth abided, the day of wrath was unaccountably postponed, and the eschatologists went back to their original prediction of doomsday at the actual turn of the Millennium.
***
Sadly enough, certain of the Remillards did meet their end during those days. Their tragedy went virtually unnoticed because of the gaudier events that Milieu historians have concentrated on; but I will tell it here as part of the family chronicle.
In the months following the Alma-Ata affair, Denis brooded over the misuse of operant metafacuities. He discussed this subject at length with both Tamara Sakhvadze and Urgyen Bhotia, and was convinced that resolute pacifism was the only ethical course open to persons with higher mind-powers. There remained, however, the odious problem of Victor. Denis had told Lucille what he knew and what he suspected about his younger brother, and she was simultaneously outraged and wary. Lucille was particularly concerned for Sunny and the nonoperant siblings left under Victor's influence, and pressed Denis to do something to help them, even if it meant a direct confrontation that might end in violence. But Denis refused, countering her reproaches with both logic and his espousal of the superChristian ethic. No course short of engineering Victor's demise was likely to resolve the terrible stalemate—and Denis would not kill his brother in cold blood even to save the lives of his mother and the others.
Denis stood by, apparently impotent, while his younger twin brothers Louis and Leon, who turned twenty-one in 1999, were brainwashed by Victor and joined him in Remco Industries as nonoperant factotums. Both young men were ruthless and intelligent, and they were also completely trustworthy, unlike many of Victor's operant associates. That left only George, who was nineteen, and Pauline, two years younger, still living with Sunny. George was an unprepossessing young man, very unassertive, who was studying computer technology under Victor's orders. I had always thought him a poor stick. Paulie, the youngest of Don and Sunny's big brood, was an exquisite creature. Except for her dark eyes, she was the image of her mother as a you
ng woman—and when I saw her that year at the family Easter get-together, suddenly matured into radiant femininity, my heart stood still.
Their older sister Yvonne had been married in 1996 to the middle-aged operant crook Robert Fortier, whose sinister mother still acted as Sunny's nominal housekeeper, all the while contriving to dominate her utterly. Over the years, by use of ingenious metapsychic variants on old-fashioned racketeering, Victor and Fortier had converted Remco into an international operation that now owned not only pulpwood harvesting companies but a large paper mill in New Brunswick, a chemical plant in Maine, and other forest-product industries in cities scattered across upper New England and southeastern Canada. Having succeeded so well in his first dynastic ploy, Victor now decided to attempt a much more audacious variation on the theme.
One of my nephew's underhanded acquisitions was a small genetic-engineering firm in Burlington, Vermont. This outfit had perfected and patented a bacterial organism called a lignin degrader, that broke down (i.e., "ate") a common waste product of the pulpwood industry, converting it into a host of valuable chemicals that had heretofore been obtained from increasingly scarce petroleum. The process utilizing the superior bug was very nearly ready to be put into production, and it was going to be a gold mine; but Victor's Remco Industries faced a dilemma well known to medium-sized corporations—it did not have enough capital to develop a lignin-chemistry company of its own, which would reap huge profits. Rather, it would have to license the process to giant petrochemical conglomerates and settle for a much smaller piece of the pie.
Naturally, Victor balked at this. The golden bug and its principal nurturer had been stolen from a famous Michigan university at considerable risk to Victor's own hide, and he had invested a good deal of money in the perfecting of the process. Having won game and set, as it were, he wasn't going to let outsiders rob him of the match.
There was only one font of finance he felt he could safely approach for additional capitalization, a money source that had earlier approached him, only to be repulsed. Now, Victor decided, the time was ripe for reconsideration. And so he made a telephone call to Kieran O'Connor's Chicago office, waited patiently while his name was passed from buffer zone to buffer zone in the corporate hierarchy until it reached the Boss of Bosses, and then made his proposition.
A merger, to their mutual profit. To seal the deal, Victor would marry Shannon O'Connor and Kieran would take Pauline Remillard.
O'Connor laughed his head off at the raw Franco chutzpah of it all. It was primitive. It was damn near Sicilian! Still, Kieran had kept his eye on Victor over the years and had been impressed. At the callow age of twenty-nine, Victor was worth upward of sixty-two million dollars—peanuts when compared to Kieran's own empire, but not too shabby when you remembered that the kid had started out with nothing but his drunken daddy, a '74 Chevy pickup truck, and two Jonsered chain saws boosted from a local logging-equipment supplier. And this lignin-gobbling bacterium had possibilities. Kieran's facile mind hatched a scenario in which the process could be used as a fulcrum in a scheme to corner the world's energy supply. As for Victor himself, he would either have to be made an ally or eliminated. The dynastic link-up opened the way for either option.
After their telephone conversation had gone on for some ten minutes, Kieran told Victor that he was inclined to accept the proposition. There were, however, two small matters that would have to be clarified. First, did Victor have his sister Pauline under complete control, as Kieran did Shannon? ... and was she really beautiful and unsophisticated?
Of course!
Kieran hoped that was true, because they couldn't coerce the girl permanently. The second matter was more delicate. Kieran did not want Pauline as his wife or mistress. He would possess her only once (for reasons not explained to Victor), and after that she would be married to Kieran's close associate Warren Griffith, who had recently lost his third wife under tragic circumstances. There was, however, this thing about Griff. He was brilliant, both in coercive talent and business acumen, but he had special personal needs. Pauline, as his wife, would live in a ménage à trois, and the third party was a young man of rather stern disposition. Did Victor understand?
Different strokes for different folks, Victor said. But Kieran would have to make damn certain that Paulie didn't end up like the third wife.
Kieran would see to it personally.
Then there was no problem.
And so this decidedly curious arrangement was agreed upon. But Victor made the mistake of explaining the situation very carefully to Pauline while she was under his coercive hold. He talked to her for three hours one late October afternoon when the sky was clear and the trees were in full color on the hillsides surrounding Berlin, and then he left her in the back yard of Sunny's big house on Sweden Street, sitting on a rustic bench under an incandescent maple tree. When her brother George came home that day from computer college, she asked him to take her for a ride in his car along the Androscoggin River, and while they drove she told him without any emotion at all (for that was the way Vic's brainwashing affected the forcibly latentized) what was in store for her.
George thought about it in his nerdish way. And he thought about his own future as a superhacker under Vic's mental thumb, and his older brother Denis's apparent inability to help any of them. Then he told Paulie not to worry. They drove up to Dave's Gun Shop in Milan, where George bought a handsome Marlin 120 shotgun with a twenty-six-inch barrel and a genuine American walnut stock and forend, all hand-checkered, because George didn't want to wind things up in a sleazy way. After that they found a nice spot where Paulie could watch the river and the trees reflected in it and not notice a thing. There was string in the glove compartment that George tied cleverly around the trigger and guard of the gun to take care of himself.
Vic knew at once when they died and so did I; but for some reason he did not receive the farspoken truth of the affair that was transmitted to me in the split second of George's final agony. Instead, Victor went to the car and found the note, which he destroyed before calling the State Police to report the double tragedy. He was mad as hell. Kieran O'Connor took the news more calmly and said that he would think things over, and doubtless something could be worked out between them after all. He promised to get back to Victor early next year, after the Millennial hysteria cooled and the financial world returned to normal.
Sunny's link to a reality that had become insupportable was shattered by this final trauma. She smiled a great deal at the double funeral and said that Don and the five dead children spoke to her from heaven, saying she would soon be joining them. Victor now had no objection to her going to Hanover to live, so Sunny spent her last months in the pleasant house on East South Street with Denis and Lucille, rocking newborn Maurice and reading storybooks to little Philip.
I saw her nearly every day. She remembered who I was when I would address her as Marie-Madeleine, as I had done when we first met in the Berlin Public Library thirty-eight years earlier. We often spoke about those days. At other times, her drifting mind perceived young Maurice as baby Denis, and she and I would re-enact some of the simple metapsychic teaching games I had devised so long ago. Such charades soothed her even as they tortured me, but at any rate they did not last long. She died the next spring, in March, impatient for the flowers to bloom.
13
MOUNT WASHINGTON,
NEW HAMPSHIRE, EARTH
31 DECEMBER 1999
THERE WAS THE question of where to spend the Turn of the Millennium ... Her father was going to an opulent masked ball in Vienna where the international set was prepared to outdo the twilight of Byzantium, and he invited her to accompany him. She declined. It wasn't her style to waltz away the fateful hours in the company of tipsy financiers and diamond-crusted media stars, and then at midnight link arms to sing "Briiderlein und Schwesterlein" and "Auld Lang Syne," awash in sentimental tears and vintage champagne.
No. She wanted something different ... just in case the world did end,
as the crazies kept predicting. Something incomparably dramatic.
Kieran laughed indulgently, but then went all serious and reminded her that she would have to be with him in Zurich without fail on Monday January 3 for the signing session establishing their new European satellite consortium, in which she was a nominal officer. Perhaps, he suggested offhandedly, she could spend the holiday weekend skiing. She would be welcome to use Darmstadter's chalet at Gstaad, since he and his family would be going to the ball.
She thought about that. She was a superb skier, and her operancy gave her unusual talents that added zest to the sport. But she would not go to Gstaad. For one thing, her father had suggested it. For another, it was crowded and artificial and she might meet people she knew. Her fancy painted a very different picture of the Millennial Eve: a precipitate slope of powder snow, virgin in the moonlight, and herself flying downhill, a streaming torch in her hand, into the blackness below. Yes!
And then she had another great idea. The perfect place—and an appropriate companion.
She telephoned him and invited him to be her guest in the Bugaboos. He did ski, didn't he?
"Yes," he said.
"Then let me send the family Learjet for you and we can meet in Banff. Our chopper and a private guide will be waiting. We'll have to see one another eventually. Why not do it this way, without him even knowing?"
"He doesn't know?"
"He's in Europe. That's why I'm ... free."
There was a pause on the other end of the line, and then he said, "If you'd like something really climactic, an even bigger thrill—"
"Bigger than skiing the Bugaboos?"
He told her what he had in mind and this time it was her turn to hesitate. "Is it possible?"
"If you're black diamond ... and if you have some PK, it's quite possible. I've done it twice."
INTERVENTION Page 54
