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PROLOGUE
 
KAUAI, HAWAII, EARTH
27 OCTOBER 2113
 
IT WAS DAWN IN 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 meters 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 in 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 this volume that he couldn’t bear to break off and go to bed.
 
Now only the final page remained.
 
He picked up the input microphone of the transcriber again, cleared his throat, and began to record:
 
I stayed on the planet Caledonia with Jack and Dorothée for nearly six weeks, until they bowled me over (along with most of the rest of the Milieu) by announcing that they would marry in the summer of 2078. Then I finally reclaimed the Great Carbuncle, which had done a damn fine job, went back to my home in New Hampshire, and tried to decide what kind of wedding present to give the improbable lovers.
 
I was feeling wonderful! Le bon dieu was in his heaven and all was right with the Galactic Milieu.
 
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 gray-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 gray-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.
 
“Batège, maybe you’re right.” The bookseller picked up the silver correction stylo, tapped the display, and dictated a final word, changing “the 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 goddam stupid wishful thinking in the ash can 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 seeker-sense sift through the human auras glimmering far downslope. The residents and holidaymakers 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 had 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 pigheaded 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 machine 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 toward 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 pants 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 desk lamp as 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? Somet’ing 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’ t’ing yo’ catch some moemoe den egg on ovah my place. Da Mo’i Lylmik wen send special visitors. It say dey gone clarify few t’ings li’ dat fo’ yo’ write summore.
 
“Who the hell are these visitors?”
 
Come down in 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 desk lamp and the transcriber and shuffled after the cat. The key ring 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.