"Oh, yes, thank you, sir." She bit her lips in an obvious attempt to restrain a giggle. "Very pleasant. The Morelons are gracious hosts."
He inclined his head. "Thank you, dear. It's a pleasure to have you here, and anyway, we have a reputation to uphold." He relaxed in his chair and studied her casually. She appeared unaffected by his inspection.
The girl was as complete a contrast to Armand as Alain could imagine. Her blondeness, fair skin and petite form were so distant from Armand's black-haired, black-eyed bulk that they might have come from different species. Yet the two seemed ideally suited to one another. Her vivacity and self-assurance had coaxed Armand out of his two decades of introversion. His steadiness and endurance would anchor her against recklessness and flights of fancy. Their obvious mutual affection would be more than enough to soothe the inevitable abrasions of life as a unit.
With a start Alain realized that he had slid unconsciously into regarding Teresza, who had been a stranger to him less than a full day before, as Armand's wife-to-be.
"Armand," he said, "do you have an agenda for the day?"
Armand glanced back over his shoulder. "No, not yet. Did you want to suggest something?"
"You might want to show Teresza the Kropotkin River." Alain turned back to Teresza. "It's quite beautiful along much of its length. There's a section along the southern border of our land that runs over a rapids and down a modest falls. It makes a pretty photograph." He chuckled. "It's just about the only photogenic scenery anywhere near Jacksonville. Corn likes flat ground."
Armand set the refilled coffeepot on the stove, returned to the table and stood behind Teresza, his arms draped loosely over her. She took his hands in hers and let her head loll back against his chest, a picture of serenity in Armand's embrace.
The young couple's eyes flicked over Alain's shoulder. He glanced back and saw Elyse and Charisse enter the kitchen behind him. Murmured greetings were exchanged all around as the Morelon women took mugs from the cupboard and settled themselves at the table.
"Will you need the motorcycle today, Grandpere?" Armand said. "It's quite a walk to the falls, and we did a lot of walking yesterday."
"Take it, my boy. Oh, one thing: would you be kind enough to run me up to the train station in about two hours?"
"Of course, Grandpere. Farm business?"
"No, just a visit with some friends. I'll probably be back on an early afternoon train tomorrow, if you could be near the radio after lunch."
"Certainly," Armand said. "Might I have the benefit of your advice before you go?" His hands rose from Teresza's shoulders to cup her face. Teresza gazed dreamily up at him.
Alain became alert. "What is it you'd like to discuss?" Charisse slid forward on her chair. Elyse turned in her seat and focused her full attention on her only son.
Armand smiled. "It's nothing to worry about. Just the purchase of an engagement ring. Last night your heir proposed marriage to a girl you met less than a day ago."
Charisse clapped both hands to her mouth and squeaked. Elyse said "Oh!" as the first tears leaked down her face. Alain rose from his chair, circled the table, and pulled his grandson into his arms. A moment later Armand was held fast by the arms of the four people dearest to him in all the world, ignoring the furious burble of the boiling coffee, celebrating the impending birth of a new family by tying it in a living knot of love.
***
Victoria smiled as her mother's face went momentarily pale and slack, then became a portrait of narrow-eyed, red-cheeked suspicion.
"Exactly what sort of job is this?" her mother said. The cords in her neck thickened as her hands clenched on the dinette table. "Are you still --"
"A virgin?" Victoria drawled. "Yes, Mom, I'm still a virgin. And I'll remain that way, so you can relax. I'm going to be an experimental subject for a psych project."
"What did --"
"I went to a psi screening and busted all their charts." Victoria allowed herself to taste triumph once more. "It turns out that they were willing to pay me a fortune to be their lab rat. Me, and one other student who scored about as well. So you're going to have to get used to living the good life, like it or not."
Victoria hadn't taken her mother by surprise very often, nor had her mother's reaction to surprises usually been pleasant. Yet she hadn't thought long about whether to reveal her good news to Elizabeth. She'd assumed that no one could fail to be delighted by a cash windfall like the one she was about to collect.
She'd been wrong. The cloud of fury that massed around Elizabeth Peterson's head was enough to suck all the spring sunlight from their little kitchen.
"Do you know," Elizabeth growled, "what ordinary humans used to call us? Do you know what they used to do to people like us when we were found out? Did it occur to you even briefly that this was something you should discuss with me before you exposed us all to ostracism or worse?"
A part of Victoria wanted to cringe before the harbingers of maternal violence, as she'd done for twenty years. But this time a larger, cooler part said: You don't need to be afraid of her any more. You don't need to be afraid of anything. And in the place where she reasoned, Victoria could assemble the facts of her situation and see that it was so.
"Relax, Mom. It's an ongoing program. They've been seeking out psi talents at Gallatin for hundreds of years, if I can believe what Mandeville said. It's for the study of the brain and research into alternatives to radio. Believe me, they didn't offer me a, a thousand dekas a month because they want to burn me at the stake."
"So you lit up at the money and decided nothing could go wrong, did you?" Elizabeth's fury had not abated. "No possibility that the money was a cover for something a little less wholesome? No possibility that once you're in the program, it might turn out to be something other than advertised? No possibility that the experiments they want to do on you might damage your powers or the rest of your mind?"
Victoria held down her embryonic misgivings and said cheerfully, "None at all."
Elizabeth's lips pulled back from her teeth, and Victoria braced herself. When she felt her mother's psionic hands press against her, she threw her entire force into an immediate, headlong counterattack, a piledriver of pure telekinetic force aimed straight at Elizabeth's diaphragm.
Elizabeth flew backwards and crashed into the cupboards. Her face paled and her mouth flapped open like a fish netted and raised from the water. Exulting, Victoria pressed her advantage, watching with glee as her mother's expression became desperate and her color went from red through white to cyanotic blue.
"Aren't you tired of this game, Mom? I mean, it's been years and years now. I can tell when you're angry without this. I can tell when you think I haven't listened the way a good girl should. Can you tell that I'm getting a bit ticked off about your little ways? Can you tell that I think I'm ready to start making my own decisions now, and that it's time you learned to accept them?"
Elizabeth's body convulsed from oxygen deprivation and pressure on her spinal cord. Her arms flapped helplessly against the invisible pinion.
"Oh, by the way," Victoria said, "the other student that got hired for this job is Armand Morelon. We're going to be together about eighty hours a month from now on. I'll have lots and lots of time to work on him. I won't even have to make any clever excuses to lure him off with me. So the rest of your little campaign is still intact. Now lighten up."
Victoria released her pressure all at once. Elizabeth flopped to the floor and gasped for her life. It took her a long while to regain the ability to speak.
"How...how did you learn to do that?"
Victoria smiled.
"Practice."
***
Idem felt the turbulence above as a man would feel a cold breeze upon his neck.
At first It quailed at the psi radiance, fearing that the Other had found a way to penetrate Its last hiding place. But the fringe emanations did not suggest a focused probe of Idem's redoubt. Rather they spoke of a storm, a conflict between flows
of control. The struggle had rippled the psionic sea in which It lived, nothing more. The Other was not seeking Idem, but was engaged in a battle on the surface.
With what? All Idem could detect was the static from the psi lashings. It could not feel any distinctions in the energy flows whose edges had scraped across Its mind.
It extended the least of tendrils toward the fray, hoping for a finer discrimination of the contending currents.
One of the psi fronts was an expanding sphere, a wall of pressure that sought to crush its surroundings. The other was a linear thrust, a column of power that strove to pierce its target's defenses and pin it in place.
It watched as the sphere buckled and failed before the sharply collimated lance. Seconds later, the storm had ended and both psi waves had ceased.
Could there be two Others?
The concept of "two" did not come to It easily. It had recognized that there was an Other only after a protracted ordeal. The boundary between It and the Other was the only boundary It had ever recognized.
It sent psi feelers in all directions, at the greatest sensitivity It could attain. The old spikes of rejection and confinement, which had put It to flight and confined It within Its rocky prison centuries before, were almost all still in place. Here and there they had weakened marginally. Two minuscule patches of them had failed, leaving the surface bare to Its inspection.
Not two Others. Three.
A forest of possibilities sprouted within Idem's mind. With so many Others, perhaps It was not the focus of all Their effort and rage. Perhaps They spent some of Their time quarreling with one another.
It marshaled Its resolve for a full surface probe.
Chapter 13
Dmitri Ianushkevich opened the cipher-locked door to the monitoring chamber and stood aside to let Alain Morelon enter. Morelon went immediately to sit before the bank of screens and stared into the one that peered into Tellus's bedchamber. His face turned ashen as he watched.
The monitor showed Tellus curled into a fetal position and wedged into a corner. His eyes were closed. He appeared motionless.
"Is he still conscious?" Morelon said.
"Not continuously," Ianushkevich said. "But the conditioning seems to be holding."
Morelon turned back to face him, eyes sharp. "Not perfectly. I've had failures to ripen."
"We know."
The clan patriarch's expression softened. "I knew you would." He turned back to the screen. "How is his overall health?"
The question made Ianushkevich want to hide. "His weight is eight percent below the safety threshold. His heart and respiration rates vary considerably. His white cell count has edged into the danger zone, but we've detected no increase in infectious agents yet." He drew a deep breath and resolved to be completely candid. "We think he's got about three months left."
Morelon's eyes flared again. "How many candidates for his successor have you found?"
It was the question Ianushkevich had expected him to ask, but it was jolting nonetheless.
"Two, Alain. Both are Gallatin underclassmen. By coincidence, both are from Jacksonville --"
"And one is Armand."
Ianushkevich nodded. "Of course."
Morelon was silent for a long time.
"What would you say are the prospects?"
"Of readying a new God in time to avert ecological collapse? We don't know, Alain. We've never had this little time to work before. Both candidates are superbly gifted, more powerful psi talents than any we've ever seen before, but you know that's not the crux of the thing. The autonomous nodes in the pons and cerebellum have to reconfigure to accept the planetary panorama and attend to its maintenance." He waved at the screens. "D'Avenire --"
"You're not supposed to do that."
Ianushkevich pressed his lips together and nodded. "Of course. The present Tellus responded to the conditioning and the drugs as if he'd been born to the job. We even entertained hopes that he might be spared the disintegration. But it still took nearly six months to prepare him. He was barely ready to ascend the throne when his predecessor..." The parapsychologist trailed off.
Morelon nodded. He laid his palms against his thighs and waited in commanding silence. His eyes were unrelenting.
"We're going to have to take some chances, Alain."
"The other candidate first."
"Of course, but --"
"No buts, Dmitri." Morelon rose from his seat and glared down at him. "We have an agreement. I exposed Armand to you because I knew there might be no choice this time. How many generations has it been since there were more than two or three candidates to choose from?"
Ianushkevich grimaced. "I can't remember."
The silence stretched between them.
"Believe me, Alain, if I can spare him this duty, I will. I know what this must be like for you."
Morelon stared at him a moment more, then turned back to the monitors. Tellus had not stirred.
"No, Dmitri, you don't. It wasn't your younger brother who first gave his life to this need, it was mine. It wasn't your decision that you and the rest of the Cabal cloister yourselves away from all other eyes, it was mine. It won't be someone dearer to you than your own life who'll be caged like a laboratory specimen for the next fifty years, until the synaptic governors in his brain fail and send him spinning into madness and death. It won't be someone for whose sake you'd gladly suffer and die instead. It won't be someone you'd sacrifice the whole of Hope to save. And as long as there's any alternative at all, it won't be Armand." He made for the door. "I still hold the Cabal and all its works at my mercy. Don't test my resolve."
Ianushkevich made no answer. Alain Morelon let himself out.
***
Morelon House was a place transformed.
Armand's announcement of his betrothal to Teresza put a current of excitement into the Morelon clan that even its most distant kindred were hard pressed to contain. The perceptible changes were few -- new decorations and knickknacks here and there; music earlier each evening and later each night; bright smiles and laughter at all hours -- but there was no concealing the bubbling delight all the Morelons felt at the engagement of their beloved scion. The corn itself seemed to spring from the ground with a heightened vitality, eager to be present for the impending union.
Armand watched, pleasantly bemused, as his mother and sister took charge of his fiancee. Teresza's days became an endless round of introductions, first to every member of the family old enough to walk, then to the householders of every other notable family in Jacksonville, after that to the history and customs of the Morelon clan, and then to shopping, shopping, shopping. In the eight days available for the purpose, Elyse and Charisse strove to bury their kinsman-to-be in luxuries. No article of clothing that suited Teresza was allowed to go unpurchased. She received a dozen pairs of shoes alone. No adornment, however frivolous, was spared: scarves, veils, jewels, cosmetics, perfumes, even saucily diaphanous outfits suitable only for the bedroom. No comfort or convenience was omitted from her trousseau. At last she cried for a halt to the avalanche of gifts, to Armand's amusement.
"Armand," she squeaked, "why are they doing this?"
He merely grinned at her until she began to bounce and squeal from frustration, then laid his big hands gently on her shoulders.
"Because they love you."
"They hardly know me!"
"Don't they?"
"Well..."
"Terry," he murmured, "Morelons get to know people pretty fast. Don't you?"
"I'm not a Morelon!"
His hands slid together to cup her face. "You will be."
During the few hours each day his mother and sister allowed him Teresza's company, Armand took her into the mysteries of the family business. He fretted that it wouldn't be to her taste, but she showed an unexpected degree of interest in the intricacies of scheduling, resource management, and long range planning required by the huge farm.
"These fields," he said, flicking a finger against a
square at the edge of the map on the office wall, "are being held in reserve. These past fifty years, the demand has varied from projections by as much as eight percent. So we under-cultivate by about two percent in the early spring, and do a shock-planting on the reserve fields if demand overshoots expectations by more than two percent."
She canted her head. "What's a shock-planting?"
"Seed that's been genetically modified for quick growth, with some special agrochemicals to help it along. We don't like to do it. The field suffers nitrogen exhaustion and has to be rotated out of production for the next season, like it or not. But it's that or waste a lot of good corn in slow seasons and disappoint our customers in busy ones."
She nodded. "How do you pick the reserve fields?"
"Every year, a sixth of the acreage is rotated out of production. The sixth that would be rotated out a year ahead is divided into production and reserve. It keeps the records simple."
He let his hand fall and turned to face her. "Is this boring you?"
The puzzlement in her bright blue eyes was entirely genuine. "Not at all. Why?"
"Well, it isn't psychology."
"Armand, it's better." She took his hands in hers. "It's life."
From dinner onward, their evenings were a barely restrained revel, a celebration of excited anticipation expressed in giggles, absurd jokes, and looks and gestures of endearment that a complete stranger couldn't miss. Each night the hearthroom rang with song, with clapping, with the inarticulate delight of voices raised in affectionate japes and ripostes. It went on until, drunk to bursting with family, the couple rose to take their leave and, against wails of protest from the others, retire to their bedroom.
There, bathed in the light of a single candle, they explored the dominion of bliss. They gave their bodies to one another without reservation. Theirs was the fire of youth and the wholeness of love, wherein the oldest things are made new. Each caress, each tenderness, each whispered word became a new skein in the bond that knitted them together, a new stone fitted to their rising edifice of joy.
Which Art In Hope (Spooner Federation Saga Book 1) Page 9
