The Intervention Part 2

FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD.

I WAS BORN in 1945, in the northern New Hampshire mill town of Berlin. My twin brother Donatien and I took our first breaths on 12 August, two days after j.a.pan opened the peace negotiations that would end World War II. Our mother, Adele, was stricken with labor pains at early Sunday Ma.s.s, but with the stubbornness so characteristic of our clan gave no indication of it until the last notes of the recessional hymn had been sung. Then her brother-in-law Louis and his wife drove her to St. Luke's, where she was delivered of us and died. Our father Joseph had perished six months earlier at the Battle of Iwo Jima.

On the day of our birth, clouds of radioactivity from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still being carried around the world by the jet-stream winds. But they had nothing to do with our mutations. The genes for metapsychic operancy lay dormant in many other families besides ours. The immortality gene, however, was apparently unique. Neither trait would be recognized for what it was until many years had gone by.

Don and I, husky orphans, had a legacy from our mother of a GI insurance policy and an antique mantelpiece clock. We were taken in by Onc' Louie and Tante Lorraine. It meant two more mouths to feed in a family that already included six children; but Louis Remillard was a foreman at the big Berlin paper mill that also employed other males of our clan (and would employ Don and me, in good time). He was a stocky, powerful man with one leg slightly shorter than the other, and he earned good wages and owned a two-storey frame apartment on Second Street that was old but well maintained. We lived on the ground floor, and Oncle Alain and Tante Grace and their even larger brood lived upstairs. Life was cheerful, if extremely noisy. My brother and I seemed to be quite ordinary children. Like most Franco-Americans of the region, we grew up speaking French to our kinsfolk, but used English quite readily in our dealings with non-Francophone neighbors and playmates, who were in the majority.

The Family Ghost, when I first met it, also spoke French.

It happened on an unforgettable day when I was five. A gang of us cousins piled into the back of an old pickup truck owned by Gerard, the eldest. We had a collection of pots and pans and pails, and were off on a raspberry-picking expedition into the National Forest west of town, a cut-over wilderness beyond the York Pond fish hatchery. The berries were spa.r.s.e that year and we scattered widely, working a maze of overgrown logging tracks. Don and I had been warned to stick close to our cousin Cecile, who was fourteen and very responsible; but she was a slow and methodical picker while we two skipped from patch to patch, skimming the easily reached fruit and not bothering with berries that were harder to get.

Then we got lost. We were separated not only from Cecile and the other cousins but from each other. It was one of the first times I can remember being really apart from my twin brother, and it was very frightening. I wandered around whimpering for more than an hour. I was afraid that if I gave in to panic and bawled, I would be punished by having no whipped cream on my raspberry slump at supper.

It began to get dark. I called feebly but there was no response. Then I came into an area that was a dense tangle of brambles, all laden with luscious berries. And there, not ten meters away, stood a big black bear, chomping and slurping.

"Donnie! Donnie!" I screamed, dropping my little berry pail. I took to my heels. The bear did not follow.

I stumbled over decaying slash and undergrowth, dodged around rotted stumps, and came to a place where sapling paper birches had sprung up. Their crowded trunks were like white broom-handles. I could scarcely push my way through. Perhaps I would be safe there from the bear.

"Donnie, where are you?" I yelled, still terror-stricken.

I seemed to hear him say: Over here.

"Where?" I was weeping and nearly blind. "I'm lost! Where are you?" He said: Right here. I can hear you even though it's quiet. Isn't that funny?

I howled. I shrieked. It was not funny. "A bear is after me!"

He said: I think I see you. But I don't see the bear. I can only see you when I close my eyes, though. That's funny, too. Can you see me, Rogi?

"No, no, " I wept. Not only did I not see him, but I began to realize that I didn't really hear him, either - except in some strange way that had nothing to do with my ears. Again and again I screamed my brother's name. I wandered out of the birch grove into more rocky, open land and started to run.

I heard Don say: Here's Cecile and Joe and Gerard. Let's find out if they can see you, too.

The voice in my mind was drowned out by my own sobbing. It was twilight - entre chien et loup, as we used to say. I was crying my heart out, not looking where I was going, running between two great rock outcroppings...

"Arrete!" commanded a loud voice. At the same time something grabbed me by the back of my overall straps, yanking me off my feet. I gave a shattering screech, flailed my arms, and twisted my neck to look over my shoulder, expecting to see black fur and tusks.

There was nothing there.

I hung in air for an instant, too stupefied to utter a sound. Then I was lowered gently to earth and the same adult voice said, "Bon courage, ti-frere. Maintenant c'est tr'bien. "

The invisible thing was telling me not to be afraid, that everything was now all right. What a hope! I burst into hysterical whoops and wet my underpants.

The voice soothed me in familiar Canuckois, sounding rather like my younger uncle Alain. An unseen hand smoothed my touseled black curls. I screwed my eyes shut. A ghost! It was a ghost that had s.n.a.t.c.hed me up! It would feed me to the bear!

"No, no, " the voice insisted. "I won't harm you, little one. I want to help you. Look here, beyond the two large rocks. A very steep ravine. You would have fallen and hurt yourself badly. You might have been killed. And yet I know nothing of the sort happened... so I saved you myself. Ainsi le debut du paradoxe!"

"A ghost!" I wailed. "You're a ghost!"

I can hear the thing's mind-voice laughing even now as it said: Exactement! Mais un fantome familier...

Thus I was introduced to the being who would help me, advise me - and bedevil me - at many critical points in my life. The Family Ghost took my hand and drew me along a shadowy, twisted game trail, making me run so fast I was left nearly breathless and forgot to cry. It rea.s.sured me but warned me not to mention our meeting to anyone, since I would not be believed. All too probably brother and cousins would laugh at me, call me a baby. It would be much better to tell them how bravely I had faced the bear.

As the first stars began to show, I emerged from the forest onto the road near the fish hatchery where the pickup truck stood. My cousins and the fish men were there and welcomed me with relieved shouts. I told them I had flung my berry bucket in a bear's face, cleverly gaining time to make my escape. None of them noticed that I stank slightly of pipi. My brother Don did look at me strangely, and I was aware of a question hovering just behind his lips. But then he scowled and was silent.

I got double whipped cream on my raspberry slump that night.

I told n.o.body about the Family Ghost.

To understand the mind of our family, you should know something of our heritage.

The Remillards are members of that New England ethnic group, descended from French-Canadians, who are variously called Franco-American, Canado-Americaine, or more simply Canuck. The family name is a fairly common one, now p.r.o.nounced REM-ih-lard in a straightforward Yankee way. As far as I have been able to discover, no other branches of the family harbored so precocious a set of supravital genetic traits for high metafunction and self-rejuvenation. (The "bodiless" mutagene came from poor Teresa, as I shall relate in due time. ) Our ancestors settled in Quebec in the middle 1600s and worked the land as French peasants have done from time immemorial. Like their neighbors they were an industrious, rather b.l.o.o.d.y-minded folk who looked with scorn upon such novelties as crop rotation and fertilization of the soil. At the same time they were fervent Roman Catholics who regarded it as their sacred duty to have large families. The predictable result, in the harsh climate of the St. Lawrence River Valley, was economic disaster. By the mid-nineteenth century the worn-out, much-subdivided land provided no more than a bare subsistence, no matter how hard the farmers worked. In addition to the struggle required to earn a living, there was also political oppression from the English-speaking government of Canada. An insurrection among the habitants in 1837 was mercilessly crushed by the Canadian army.

But one must not think of these hardy, troublesome people as miserable or downtrodden. Au contraire! They remained indomitable, l.u.s.ty, and intensely individualistic, cherishing their large families and their stern parish priests. Their devotion to home and religion was more than strong - it was fierce, leading to that solidarity (a species of the coercive metafaculty) that Milieu anthropologists call ethnic dynamism. The Quebec habitants not only survived persecution and a grim environment, they even managed to increase and multiply in it.

At the same time that the French-Canadian population was outstripping the resources of the North, the Industrial Revolution came to the United States. New England rivers were harnessed to provide power for the booming textile mills and there was a great demand for laborers who would work long hours for low salaries. Some of these jobs were taken by the immigrant Irish, themselves refugees from political oppression and economic woe, who were also formidably dynamic. But French-Canadians also responded to the lure of the factories and flocked southward by the tens of thousands to seek their fortunes. The migratory trend continued well into the 1900s.

"Little Canadas" sprang up in Ma.s.sachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and Rhode Island. The newcomers clung to their French language and to much of their traditional culture, and most especially to their Catholic faith. They were thrifty and diligent and their numerous offspring followed the parents into the family occupation. They became American citizens and worked not only as mill-hands but also as carpenters, mechanics, lumberjacks, and keepers of small shops. Most often, only those children who became priests or nuns received higher education. Gradually the French-Canadians began to blend into the American mainstream as other ethnic groups had done. They might have been quite rapidly a.s.similated - if it hadn't been for the Irish.

Ah, how we Franco-Americans hated the Irish! (You citizens of the Milieu who read this, knowing what you do of the princ.i.p.al human bloodlines for metapsychic operancy, will appreciate the irony. ) Both the Irish and the French minorities in New England were Celts, of a pa.s.sionate and contentious temperament. Both were, in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rivals for the same types of low-status employment. Both had endured persecution in their homelands and social and religious discrimination in America because of their Catholic faith. But the Irish were much more numerous, and they had the tremendous social advantage of speaking the English language - with a rare flair, at that! The Irish parlayed their genius for politicking and self-aggrandizement into domination of the New England Catholic hierarchy, and even took over entire city governments. We Francos were more aloof, politically naive, lacking in what Yankees called "team spirit" because with us it was the family that came first. With our stubbornly held traditions and French language, we became an embarra.s.sment and a political liability to our more ambitious coreligionists. It was an era fraught with anti-Catholic sentiment, in which all Catholics were suspected of being "un-American. " So the shrewd Irish-American bishops decreed that stiff-necked Canucks must be forcibly submerged in the great melting-pot. They tried to abolish those parishes and parochial schools where the French language was given first place. They said that we must become like other Americans, let ourselves be a.s.similated as the other ethnic groups were doing.

a.s.similate - intermarry - and the genes for metapsychic operancy would be diluted all unawares! But the great pattern was not to be denied.

We Francos fought the proposed changes with the same obstinacy that had made us the despair of the British Canadians. The actions of those arrogant Irish bishops during the nineteenth century made us more determined than ever to cling to our heritage. And we did. Eventually, the bishops saved face with what were termed "compromises. " But we kept our French churches, our schools, and our language. For the most part we continued to marry our own, increasing our h.o.m.ozygosity - concentrating those remarkable genes that would put us in the vanguard of humanity's next great evolutionary leap.

It was not until World War II smashed the old American social structures and prejudices that the Canucks of New England were truly a.s.similated. Our ethnocentricity melted away almost painlessly in those postwar years of my early childhood. But it had prevailed long enough to produce Don and me... and the others whose existence we never suspected until long after we reached adulthood.

4.

SOUTH BOSTON, Ma.s.sACHUSETTS, EARTH.

2 AUGUST 1953.

HE WAS ON his way home from the ten-o'clock at Our Lady, toting Sunday papers and some groceries Pa had remembered they were out of, when he got the familiar awful feeling and said to himself: No! I'm outside, away from her. It can't be!

But it was. Sour spit came up in his throat and his knees went wobbly and the shared pain started glowing blue inside his head, the pain of somebody dying who would take him along if he wasn't careful.

But he was outside, in the sunshine. More than six blocks from home, far beyond her reach. It couldn't be her hurting and demanding. Not out here. It never happened out here...

It happened in a dark room, cluttered and musty, where a candle in a blue-gla.s.s cup burned in front of one Sorrowful Mother (the one with seven swords through her naked pink heart), and the other one lay on her bed with the beads tangled in her bony fingers and her mind entreating him: Pray a miracle Kier it's a test you see he always lets those he loves best suffer pray hard you must you must if you don't there'll be no miracle he won't listen...

The full force of the transmitted agony took hold of him as he turned the corner onto D Street. Traffic was fairly heavy even at this early hour, when most of Southie drowsed or marked time until the last Ma.s.s let out and the sandlot ballgames got underway and the taverns opened; but there wasn't another person in sight on the dirty sidewalks -n.o.body who could be hurting demanding calling - Not a person. An animal dying.

He saw it halfway down the block, in the gutter in front of McNulty's Dry Cleaning &. Alterations. A dog, hit by a car most likely. And Jeez he'd have to go right by it unless he went way around by the playground, and the groceries were so heavy, and it was so rotten hot, and the pleading was irresistible, and he did want to see.

It was a mutt without a collar, a white terrier mix with its coat all smeared red and brown with blood and sticky stuff from its insides.

Intelligent trustful eyes looked up at him, letting pain flood out. A few yards away in the street was a dark splotch where it had been hit. It had dragged itself to the curb, hindquarters hopelessly crushed.

Kieran O'Connor, nine years old and dressed in his shabby Sunday best, gulped hard to keep from vomiting. The dog was dying. It had to be, the way it was squashed. (Her dying was inside her, not nearly so messy. ) "Hey, fella. Hey, boy. Poor old boy. "

The dog's mind projected hurtful love, begging help. He asked it: "You want a miracle?" But it couldn't understand that, of course.

The dog said to him: Flies.

They were all over the wounded parts, feeding on the clotted blood and s.h.i.t, and Kieran grunted in revulsion. He could do something about them, at least.

"No miracle, " he muttered. He set the bag of groceries and the paper down carefully on the sidewalk and hunkered over the dog, concentrating. As he focused, the iridescent swarm panicked and took wing, and he let them have it in midair. The small green-backed bodies fell onto the hot pavement, lifeless, and Kieran O'Connor smiled through his tears and repeated: "No miracle. "

The dog was grateful. Its mind said: Thirst.

"Say- I got milk!" Kieran pulled the quart bottle out of the grocery bag, tore off the crimped foil cap, and lifted the paper lid, which he licked clean and stowed in his shirt pocket for later. Crouching over the ruined body in the sunshine, holding his breath and letting the pain lose itself inside his own head, he dripped cool milk into the dog's mouth.

"Get well. Stop hurting. Don't die. "

The animal made a groaning sound. It was unable to swallow and a white puddle spread under its open jaws. From the brain came a medley of apology and agony, and it clung to him. "Don't, " he whispered, afraid. "Please don't. I'm trying -"

A shadow fell over the boy and the dog. Kieran looked up, wild-eyed with terror. But it was only Mr. Dugan, a middle-aged bald man in a sweat-rumpled brown suit.

"Oh, " said Dugan shortly. "So it's you. " He scowled.

"I didn't do it, Mr. Dugan. A car hit it!"

"Well, can't I see that with my own two eyes? And what are you doing messing with it? It's a goner, as any fool can see, and if you don't watch out, it'll bite. "

"It won't -"

"Don't sa.s.s me, boy! And stop wasting good milk on it. I'll phone the Humane Society when I get home and they'll come and put it out of its misery. "

Kieran began to recap the bottle of milk. Tears ran down his flushed face. "How?" he asked.

Dugan threw up his hands impatiently. "Give it something. Put it down, for G.o.d's sake. Now get away from it, or I'll be telling your Pa. "

No! Kieran said. You go away! Right now!

Dugan straightened up, turned, and walked away, leaving Kieran kneeling in the filthy gutter, shielding the dog from the sun.

"Put you out of your misery, " Kieran whispered, amazed that it could be so simple. (Why did Mom try to make it complicated?) He'd never thought of it that way before. Bugs, yes; he didn't care a hoot about them. The rats, either. But a dog or even a person...

"You wouldn't take me along, would you?" Kieran asked it warily. The pain-filled eyes widened. "Stop loving me and I'll do it. Let go. Lay off. " But the dog persisted in its hold, so finally he reached out and rested his fingertips on its head, between its ears, and did it. Oddly, all of the hairs on the dog's body stiffened for an instant, then went flat. The animal coughed and lay still, and all pain ceased.

Kieran wondered if he should say a prayer. But he felt really rotten, so in the end he just covered the body with the want-ad section of the newspaper. His Pa never bothered with that part.

5.

FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD.

I WAS NOT to experience another manifestation of the Family Ghost for nearly sixteen years. That first encounter in the twilit woods took on a dreamlike aspect. It might have been forgotten, I suppose, had not the memory been rekindled every time I smelled raspberries or the distinctive pungency of bear scats. But I did not brood on it. Truth to tell, I had more important matters to occupy me: my own developing metafunctions and those of my brother. I have already mentioned that Don and I were fraternal twins, no more closely related than any singleton brothers. Many years later, Denis told me that if we had both hatched from a single egg, our brains might have been consonant enough to have attained harmonious mental intercourse, instead of the clouded and antagonistic relationship that ultimately prevailed between us. As it was, we were of very different temperaments. Don was always more outgoing and aggressive, while I was introspective. In adulthood we both were tormented by the psychological chasm separating us from normal humanity. I learned to live with it, but Don could not. In this we were like many other natural operants who came after us, our successes and tragedies blending into the ongoing evolutionary trend of the planetary Mind studied so dispa.s.sionately by the scientists of the Galactic Milieu.

In our early childhood, following that initial stress-provoked incident of farspeech and farsight out in the woods, we experienced other near-involuntary telepathic interchanges. Once Don scalded himself with hot soup and I, in the next room, jumped up screaming. I would have a furious argument with a cousin and Don would come running up, knowing exactly what the fight was about. We sometimes dreamed the same dreams and shared unspoken jokes. Eventually, we attained crude telepathic communication as well as a kind of shared farsight and mutual sensitivity. We experimented, "calling" to each other over greater and greater distances, and exercised our farsight with variations on games such as hide-and-seek and hide-the-thimble. Our cousins were blase about our talents, ascribing them to the acknowledged freakishness of twins. They learned early not to play card games with us, and casually utilized our fa.r.s.ensing abilities to track down lost items and antic.i.p.ate impending adult interference in illicit activities. We were a little weird, but we were useful. No big thing.

On one of our first days at school I was cornered by a bully and commanded to hand over my milk money, or suffer a beating. I broadcast a mental cry for help. Don came racing into the schoolyard alcove where I had been trapped, radiating coercive fury and saying not a single word. The bully, nearly twice Don's size, fled. My brother and I stood close together until the bell rang, bonded in fraternal love. This would happen often while we were young, when each of us was the other's best friend. It became rarer as we approached adolescence and ended altogether after we reached p.u.b.erty.

By the time we were nine (the age, Denis later explained to me, when the brain attains its adult size and the metafunctions tend to "solidify, " resisting further expansion unless painful educational techniques stimulate them artificially), Don and I had become fairly adept in what is now called farspeech on the intimate mode. We could communicate across distances of two or three kilometers, sharing a wide range of nuance and emotional content. Our farscanning ability was weaker, requiring intense concentration in the transmission of any but the simplest images. By mutual agreement, we never told anyone explicit details of our telepathic talent, and we became increasingly wary of demonstrating metapsychic tricks to our cousins. Like all children, we wanted to be thought "normal. " Nevertheless there was a good deal of fun to be had using the powers, and we couldn't resist playing with them surrept.i.tiously in spite of vague notions that such mind-games might be dangerous.

In the lower grades of grammar school we drove the good sisters crazy as we traded farspoken wisecracks and then snickered enigmatically out loud. We sometimes recited in eerie unison or antiphonally. We traded answers to test questions until we were placed in separate cla.s.srooms, and even then we still managed to cooperate in uncanny disruptive pranks. We were tagged fairly early as troublemakers and were easily bored and inattentive. To our contemporaries we were the Crazy Twins, ready to do the outrageous to attract attention - just as in our baby years we had vied to attract the notice of hard-working, hard-drinking Onc' Louie and kind but distracted Tante Lorraine. (But our foster parents had three additional children of their own after our arrival, for a total of nine, and we were lost in the crowd of cousins. ) As we grew older we developed a small repertoire of other metafaculties. I was the first to learn how to raise a mental wall to keep my inmost thoughts private from Don, and I was always better at weaving mind-screens than he. It provoked his anger when I retreated into my private sh.e.l.l, and he would exercise his coercive power in almost frantic attempts to break me down. His mental a.s.saults on me were at first without malice; it was rather as if he were afraid to be left "alone. " When I finally learned to block him out completely he sulked, then revealed that he was genuinely hurt. I had to promise that I would let him back into my mind "if he really needed me. " When I promised, he seemed to forget the whole matter.

Don amused himself by attempting to coerce others, a game I instinctively abh.o.r.ed and rarely attempted. He had some small success, especially with persons who were distracted. Poor Tante Lorraine was an easy mark for gifts of kitchen goodies while she was cooking, for example; but it was next to impossible to coerce the redoubtable nuns who were our teachers. Both of us experimented in trying to read the minds of others. Don had little luck, except in the perception of generalized emotions. I was more skilled in probing and occasionally picked up skeins of subliminal thought, those "talking to oneself" mumblings that form the superficial layer of consciousness; but I was never able to read the deeper thoughts of any person but my twin brother, a limitation I eventually learned to thank G.o.d for.

We developed a modest self-redaction that enabled us to speed the healing of our smaller wounds, bruises, and blisters. Curing germ-based illness, however, even the common cold, was beyond us. We also practiced psychokinesis and learned to move small objects by mind-power alone. I remember how we looted coin telephones throughout two glorious summer weeks, squandering the money on ice cream, pop, and bootleg cigarettes. Then, because we were still good Catholic Franco-American boys at heart, we had qualms of conscience. In confession Father Racine gave us the dismal news that stealing from New England Bell (we didn't reveal our modus operandi) was just as much of a sin as stealing from real human beings. Any notions we might have had of becoming metapsychic master-thieves died aborning. Perhaps because of our upbringing, perhaps because of our lack of criminal imagination, we were never tempted along these lines again. Our fatal flaws lay in other directions.

The first indications of them came when we were ten years old.

It was late on a dreary winter day. School was over, and Don and I were fooling around in what we thought was an empty school gym, making a basketball perform impossible tricks. An older boy named O'Shaughnessy, newly come to the school from a tough neighborhood in Boston, happened to come along and spot us working our psychokinetic magic. He didn't know what he was seeing - but he decided it must be something big and sauntered out to confront us.

"You two, " he said in a harsh, wheedling voice, "have got a secret gimmick - and I want in on it!"

"Comment? Comment? Qu'est-ce que c'est?" we babbled, backing away. I had the basketball.

"Don't gimme that Frog talk - I know you speak English!" He grabbed Don by the jersey. "I been watching and I seen you gimmick the ball, make it stop in midair and dribble all over your bodies and go into the hoop in crazy ways. Whatcha got - radio control?"

"No! Hey, leggo!" Don struggled in the big kid's grip and O'Shaughnessy struck him a savage, sharp-knuckled blow in the face that made my own nerves cringe. Both of us yelled.

"Shaddup!" hissed O'Shaughnessy. His right hand still clenched Don's shirt. The left, grubby and broken-nailed, seized Don's nose in some terrible street-fighter grip with two fingers thrust up the nostrils and the thumbnail dug into the bridge. Don sucked in a ragged agonized breath through his mouth, but before he could utter another sound the brute said: "Not a squeak, c.o.c.ksucker - and your brother better hold off if he knows what's good for the botha you!" The fingers jammed deeper into Don's nose. I experienced a hideous burst of sympathetic pain. "I push just a little harder, see, I could pop out his eyeb.a.l.l.s. Hey, punk! You wanna see your brother's eyeb.a.l.l.s rollin' on the gym floor? Where I could step on 'em?"

Queasily, I shook my head.

"Right. " O'Shaughnessy relaxed a little. "Now you just calm down and do a repeat of that cute trick I saw you doing when I came in. The in-and-outer long bomb. "

My mind cried out to my brother: "DonnieDonniewhatgonnaDO?

TricktrickDOit! DOitG.o.dsake - Thenhe'llKNOW - O'Shaughnessy growled, "You stalling?" He dug in. I felt pain and nausea and the peripheral area of the gym had become a dark-red fog.