Everyone you've met

Cloud is Marc Remillard's daughter and a Pliocene time-travel returnee; she is married to Kuhal and recognised Unifex as her father at once.

Denis later explained to Rogatien that the brain reaches adult size at nine, when metafunctions solidify, and that identical twins might have achieved harmony.

The Milieu comprises five exotic races who welcomed humanity into their peaceful union.

2113 is the centennial year of the Intervention, which opened the Galactic Milieu to humanity.

Hagen and Cloud are Marc's children and carry genes for superlative metafunction and self-rejuvenation.

Hanover, New Hampshire, is a college town with area heaters, gravo-magnetic ground-cars and flying eggs; Paul 'sold' it as the human capital of the Milieu.

Jack, whom Rogi calls Ti-Jean, is regarded as a saint by the exotics and is dead.

Kuhal is an armored Tanu knight riding a chaliko; a giant snow sculpture of him is the Winter Carnival's theme.

Lylmik can be fully perceived only by minds functioning on the third level of consciousness, and are said to be so alien that seeing one truly would destroy a viewer's sanity.

Operant violation of the Reproductive Statutes, and aiding and abetting it, are Class One death-penalty felonies under the Magistratum.

Marc became the greatest mass murderer in human history through the Rebellion; Rogi loved him like a son and he grew up in Rogi's bookshop.

Marcel is Rogi's large Maine Coon cat, ninth of his line, a food thief who communicates in the feline telepathic mode.

Poltroyans are a very old race that survived its own atomic weapons era, the one exception to the link between atomic weaponry and racial suicide.

Marc's Metapsychic Rebellion will climax the memoirs.

Carries genes for high metafunction and self-rejuvenation; the 'bodiless' mutagene came from Teresa, and the immortality gene seems unique to the family.

Rogi is a tall, skinny, shabby bookseller in Hanover who owns The Eloquent Page; he calls himself the most insignificant Remillard.

The clock belonged to Rogi's mother and strikes midnight during the scene.

The bookshop sells collectible paper fantasy, science fiction and horror, mostly by mail order, in the Gates House on Main Street.

The Ghost claims to be a Lylmik charged with guiding the Remillard family through Rogi, and never shows itself.

It is described as the next great step in mental evolution, which the younger races of the Milieu have not yet attained.

Mysterious mental state all human operants will be inducted into at the coadunate number; feared by some to submerge individuality.

Diamond Mask is a woman whose life was entwined with the Remillard family.

While Rogi was lost, Don communicated with him mind-to-mind, speaking in his thoughts, though neither understood what was happening.

Lucille Carrier became Denis's wife; some Milieu historians claim her psychic impetus was needed for Denis's great work.

Madeleine, twelve, claimed to have seen a shark fin while sailing on the days two operants vanished.

Paul will be Denis and Lucille's youngest son, father of Marc and Jon, and the first human on the Galactic Concilium.

The Sons of Earth is a fanatical antioperant movement begun in Spain; Kieran wants a North American branch to stir up public sentiment against operants.

Source of the 'bodiless' mutagene in the Remillard line, according to Rogatien.

Victor led the Sons of Earth to infamy.

Simbiari observer and husband of Chirish Ala; he considers the Westerners as savage as the Islanders and predicts Earth will destroy itself within fifty years.

The only other Milieu polity sharing humanity's malignant aggression heritage; its Mind formed through a sudden confluence followed by Unanimization two galactic years later.

It is a Milieu observation vessel monitoring Earth, crewed by Simbiari, Poltroyans, a Krondak and a Gi; it witnesses the second atomic bombing on 9 August 1945.

Simbiari observer and wife of Adalasstam; she thinks the bombing seals Earth's metapsychic fate and sets back coadunation of its Mind by six thousand years.

The Concilium magnates of the Krondak, Gi and Simbiari voted to disengage from Earth, while the Poltroyan Amalgam voted to continue.

Krondak Scrutator of Psychosocial Trends, a Concilium magnate and the superior officer aboard; he farspeaks the Concilium and relays its decisions.

Earth is a world the Milieu has surveilled for over sixty thousand years; it is now to be familiarized with interstellar society as a preliminary to possible Intervention.

Gi reproduction depends on island trysting sites, so loss of islands makes colonization impossible.

Methodical race whose vessels, in charge of planetary Mind observations, are held never to go wrong.

Senior Simbiari aboard; he ritually mourns the bombing with green mucus and firmly believes Earth is a lost cause that the Milieu should abandon.

A hermaphroditic, supersensitive Gi who faints from the mass death-shout, loves Earth's life and music, and hopes the Milieu will not abandon Earth.

Female Poltroyan, mate of Rimi, who is pregnant again; she notes humanity's wartime solidarity as a sign of hope.

Male Poltroyan who works in EM Modulation Records; he argues Earthlings have amazing metapsychic potential despite being ethical primitives.

Race considered imperfectly attuned to Unity; its youths find long surveillance tours tedious.

Berlin is a New Hampshire pulp-mill town on the Androscoggin River, where the Remillard cousins grew up.

Fourteen-year-old responsible cousin assigned to watch the twins on the berry-picking trip.

Descended from French-Canadians who resisted assimilation by Irish-American bishops, keeping their language, churches and schools and marrying their own, concentrating metapsychic genes.

Tremblay, a thirty-one-year-old former granite-quarryman with an M.D., was put in charge of the Dartmouth lab's public affairs.

Foreman at the Berlin paper mill who raised the orphaned twins alongside his six children in a Second Street apartment.

Genes for it lay dormant in many families; its nature was not recognized until many years after 1945.

Tante Lorraine is the kind but distracted foster mother of the twins, easily coerced by Don into giving kitchen treats.

Kieran is a nine-year-old boy in South Boston in 1953 who can read minds and feel others' pain telepathically.

Kieran's mother lies dying in a dark room, clutching rosary beads and mentally pleading with Kieran to pray for a miracle.

Dugan is a bald, middle-aged neighbor who is disapproving of Kieran, and plans to call the Humane Society about the dog.

A white terrier mix with no collar, hit by a car, its hindquarters crushed. It telepathically begs Kieran for help.

EE is a metapsychic function that has reached the transition from theory to practice; adepts can excurse out of body, for example into embassies.

Father Racine is a sensible, progressive priest who told Rogatien that masturbation is not mortally sinful.

In their terror at O'Shaughnessy's attack, the twins briefly merged minds and PK into metaconcert; they never managed to reproduce it afterward for lack of mutual trust.

O'Shaughnessy, an older Boston bully sent to New Hampshire relatives, assaulted Don and extorted the twins after seeing their psychokinetic basketball trick.

Young female Simbiari scout who became bonded to Laika through farspeaking and helped steal her from the satellite.

Regulations that Vorpi insists must be taken seriously, as one thoughtless act can jeopardize a primitive world's destiny.

Soviet dog aboard Sputnik II, rescued by the scouts as her life support was nearly exhausted; she is lively and affectionate.

Krondaku Grand Master farsensor and Dispensator who, with his spouse Taka'edoo Rok, caught the Simbiari scouts and brought them to Vorpi.

Young male Simbiari scout who, with Bali Ala, took Laika from Sputnik II and kept it secret.

Soviet satellite in a decaying eccentric orbit that will burn up on re-entry; scouts shorted its biomonitoring to hide their interference.

Spouse of Ma'elfoo and a Grand Master farsensor; both are on a Krondak Xenocultural Bureau survey.

Poltroyan commander of the observation vessel Spon-su-Brevon, with ruby eyes; he collects Earth souvenirs and has a taste for Scotch whisky.

Planet whose development was reportedly set back to barbarism on the verge of coadunation after a Milieu botanist picked fruit and spat out the pips.

Cousin Tom of Auburn, Maine gave the household the mumps after the Christmas reunion.

Family doctor who diagnosed Rogatien's bilateral orchitis and assured him he would recover.

A quiet, pretty girl who shares Rogatien's love of science fiction; she dated him chastely, taught him bird-watching and prayed for him when ill.

In Stapledon's novel, Odd John is a mutant genius who murders a policeman, founds a colony of superior mutants on an island, and destroys it rather than fight.

Soviet region known as Apsny, the Land of the Soul, famed for the extreme longevity of its villagers.

Seliac says the Caucasus is where humanity first learned to dream, as primitive people honed their minds during the great winter.

Tamara's great-great-aunt and chief organizer of the welcoming feast.

Tamara's plush bear, which she carries everywhere.

Semyonov won the 1956 Nobel Prize for Chemistry and spoke in favor of psychic research.

Rationalist physician and head of the Sochi Institute of Mental Health; flame-red-haired, of Georgian and Cherkess descent with a Rom ancestor.

123-year-old patriarch of Verkhnyaya Bzyb and Vera's great-great-grandfather; acts as tamadar at the feast and has Vera's piercing eyes.

Five-year-old child prodigy with uncanny mental powers; she foresaw her mother's death and knew places and people she had never seen.

Long-lived, mentally gifted Abkhazian people who keep an ancient soul-way; they were scattered long ago by small minds and counsel watchful patience.

Author of books on mentalism that Pyotr dismissed as nonsense; Vera said he writes the truth.

Died in a car accident near Matsesta, after Tamara had warned her not to go on the trip.

Hidden mountain village in the Caucasus reached by an unmarked track; locals discourage outsiders. Home of the old ones.

Dave Valois offered to drive the twins home from the bachelor party but was turned down by Rogi.

The Institute took over the Duke laboratory and later adopted the McDougall Award, granting it through its staff.

Rhine addressed the American Psychological Association convention in Washington, DC, on 4 September 1967, surveying the worldwide growth of psi research.

The McDougall Award began at Duke in 1957 and is given yearly for the best parapsychology contribution by workers outside the Institute staff.

New psi research centers have spread across psychiatry, engineering, biophysics and industrial labs, such as Maimonides Hospital, Newark College of Engineering and Boeing.

The kid is to be taught in the evenings with flash cards by Don, Sunny and Rogi.

The report imagines a flying saucer landing at an American Physical Society convention as a hypothetical way ETA would be settled in minutes.

ETA is the stronger belief that UFOs actually are visitors from outer space controlled by intelligent beings, rather than merely a possibility.

The ETH is the idea that some UFOs may be spacecraft from another civilization, on another planet in the solar system or around a more distant star.

The report concludes it is safe to assume no intelligent life outside the solar system can visit Earth in the next ten thousand years.

The report says there is no observational evidence on ILE, so the question remains open.

Andropov, a KGB schemer, champions the bioenergetics research; Kolinsky privately concedes he may have been right.

Danilov runs the telepathy experiments and is anxious to win the admiral's backing and funding.

The Navy's ELF project, like the American system, is slow; Kolinsky sees telepathy as a possible instant replacement for contacting submarines.

Tamara works best shielded in the copper-screen Faraday cage, though her mental emanations seem unconnected to electromagnetic energy.

Its chief tried to use Yuri and Tamara as secret weapons against Andropov; he died, and the KGB and Andropov took over the psychic program in 1974.

Kolinsky is a Soviet admiral and sceptic of the bioenergetics program, touring the Leningrad institute and weighing its military value.

Jerzy is a seventeen-year-old Polish telepathic receiver, diving at ninety meters in the Gulf of Finland and writing messages on an underwater pad.

Sublieutenant Nazimov dives with Gawrys and relays the boy's written messages by telephone to the tender.

The diving tender lies nine kilometers west of Kronshtadt Base and relays Nazimov's and Gawrys's messages to the laboratory.

Dunlap heads the underfunded Parapsychology Unit, with only two graduate assistants, and insists on repetitive statistical testing that Jamie finds pointless.

Jamie's Granny, reached by his out-of-body projection, tells him his powers must be used for all mankind and that a friend is searching for him.

Islay is the family's holiday destination; of two islands sighted, the rocky one with conical mountains feels peaceful and the greener one has a faint aura of menace.

Jamie is a twenty-year-old Islay native with strong psychic talents, given a bursary at the University of Edinburgh; he is bored, wretched and homesick.

Nigel is a graduate assistant at the Parapsychology Unit basing his doctoral thesis on Jamie; he came to find Jamie on Arthur's Seat, apparently guided by psi.

Jamie projects himself to Islay and speaks mentally with his Granny; for nearly a year he had been unable to do it in the laboratory.

The Unit is a cramped, shabby set of offices under the eaves on the Pleasance, struggling for a new research grant.

Erskine, called Wee Wully, is Dunlap's graduate assistant and a rigid 'Mr. Objectivity' who pushes Jamie through repeated difficult tests.

Aldo 'Big Al' Camastra is the Chicago mob Boss, hosting a party for his Twenty-Fifth Wedding Anniversary at his mansion.

Betty Carolyn is Big Al's wife, who arranged the anniversary party and a special waltz dance.

Joe Porks Porcaro of the Falcone Family is orchestrating a maneuver against Big Al's interests, according to Kieran.

Nick and Carlo are Big Al's bodyguards.

Rosemary is Big Al's grown daughter, who runs an art gallery in New York and is already a close friend of Kieran.

Brebeuf Academy is an experimental Jesuit school near Concord for gifted low-income children; the Ghost says it will accept Denis on full scholarship.

The Ghost teleports Rogatien to just outside the Gentian Pond Shelter during a violent storm.

Father Ellsworth is a Jesuit who, after Denis's first year at Brebeuf, is to be told the truth about Denis's powers and protect him.

Northfield Hall is a prestigious Vermont boarding school for gifted children; it rejected Denis after Don's quarrel.

Commanding human woman and borderline suboperant whose farspeech reaches beyond the ionosphere; the others are latents in a loose mind-meld with her.

Small group of twenty-three humans who meet each Midsummer Day on Mount Adams to call mentally to extraterrestrials; attendance is declining.

Sentimental Gi observer who sympathizes with the humans and notes they have refrained from using atomic weapons for thirty years.

Observation vessel above Earth, monitoring humans during a thirty-year familiarization scheme.

Female Krondak xenopsychology enthusiast, new to the Earth tour; she identifies the Aetherian leader as a borderline suboperant.

Cynical Simb statistician who scorns humans and the Lylmik, believing Earth's world Mind would destroy itself if left alone.

Gives the officer of the watch discretionary powers, which Ra'edroo cites to justify sending a farspeech message.

Krondak superior officer aboard the observation vessel; summons his team to watch the annual Aetherian gathering and leads the farspeech reply.

Young, compassionate Poltroyan with grayish-purple humanoid face, new to Earth tour; he begs for a gesture of friendliness toward the humans.

The coal-fired cog railway climbs Mount Washington's western slope using a rack-and-pinion system.

Jeanette and Laurette are Denis's infant twin sisters, whose telepathic baby-thoughts irritate Victor.

Rogi and Denis communicate by mindspeech, but it cannot reach through mountains or across the distance between Berlin and Concord.

Mount Washington, 6,200 feet, has terrible sudden weather and has killed nearly seventy people, more than any other North American peak.

Summit House is a small, heavily insulated mountaintop hotel with a souvenir counter and a dining room with a fire and a view of the train.

She is tall, slender and strong, with pale silver-blue eyes, strawberry-blond hair under a green woolen watch cap, and an exultant smile.

A telepathic woman leading hikers up Mount Washington has a faint mind; she sings joyfully and thinks that 'they answered' from out there.

The restored Edwardian hotel at the foot of Mount Washington now operates year-round and accommodates other races.

Annarita, Don's biological daughter raised by Stanton Latimer, became a celebrated actress and a powerful suboperant.

Teresa's father, a 93-year-old astrophysicist, works at observatories on the Big Island and was eager to return there after the service.

Elaine is thirty-one, separated from her husband, and lives near Concord, New Hampshire, where she edits and publishes the UFO journal Visitant.

Lylmik who explains the fragile US-Soviet détente and how the loss will be seen as a disruption of military parity.

Central, most powerful Supervisor, gray-eyed, who speaks softly and tells the Authority that Earth's Mind could destroy or greatly magnify the Milieu.

Four senior magnates, one each from the Gi, Poltroyan, Simbiari and Krondak races, oversee Earth's preparation for Intervention.

Eupathic Impulse is a pessimistic Lylmik who thinks coadunation of the World Mind is hopeless and disapproves of Unifex's behavior.

Poltroyan magnate, a dapper bejeweled humanoid with a sense of humor, who likes humans and bets on the Canadians as operants.

Northeastern Franco-Americans are expected to produce large numbers of natural metapsychic operants before Intervention; the Lylmik reserve their encouragement for others.

Calculated that the station's loss, via the American President's link to it, will bring bellicose opponents to power and make the next station military, with dire consequences.

Simb magnate who resents Lylmik favoritism toward Earth and doubts humanity is ready for Intervention; visits a Lylmik cruiser for the first time.

Noetic Concordance is a Lylmik poet who finds glory in the unlikelihood of coadunation and has a fondness for Unifex's agent.

Gi representative, a poetic, hermaphroditic, sex-obsessed being who finds Earth's violence distressing and ends the passage afraid of humans.

Stolid Krondak magnate who deduces that the Lylmik themselves will shepherd the Franco-American operants.

A huge Lylmik vessel in Earth orbit, with a parking bay of living, luminous jelly-like plants that carry visiting craft along like digestion.

Grondin is a chain-smoking follower of Kieran who shares coercive powers with Cassidy.

Pakkala is Kieran's white-haired executive assistant, a battle-trained Chicago driver who scouts minds and discharges orgasmically when exerting his power.

Montedoro, called Boss of Bosses, wants to revive the Commission and has made his Family nearly legitimate.

Cassidy is a florid, coarse-spoken follower of Kieran who, with Grondin, coercively clears traffic and controls minds.

The Met was hosting a sellout benefit performance of La Favorita with Pavarotti, Verrett and Milnes.

LoPresti ordered the hit on the Chicago consigliere on his own authority, angry over losing the Montréal Connection.

Piccolomini is the expected Democratic nominee for 1996, popular for his antinarcotics program and close to the incumbent president.

Rosemary, Kieran's wife, started the booby-trapped Mercedes to warm it while waiting with their younger daughter.

Shannon, Kieran's three-year-old daughter, needed the bathroom, so Kieran took her away from the car before the bomb exploded.

Falcone has just been paroled from Lewisburg for tax evasion and is hounded by U.S. attorney Piccolomini.

A former tribal shaman and coercer who used mind force on the American President in Vienna; he died suddenly while jogging, apparently of heart weakness.

Green Kazakh city whose name means Father of Apples, near the Tien Shan foothills, where Yuri and Tamara have lived since 1974.

A Kazakh State University institute running a classified psychic research program with over sixty young psychics, disguised for visitors by a Kirlian aura facility.

Seven-year-old telepathic son of Tamara and Yuri, skeptical of his grandfather's claim.

A strong coercer and corrupter of children, found drowned two days after being assigned to the Institute's teaching staff, after Yuri and Tamara warned him.

Yuri's wife, pregnant with their third child; she married him at sixteen in 1974, and they were sent to Alma-Ata. She is moved by Urgyen's message.

A Tibetan from Darjeeling who arranged the Indian scholars' tour as a pretext to meet Yuri and Tamara; he can remote-view bright minds across Asia.

Nine-year-old eldest child of Tamara and Yuri; telepathic and mature beyond his years.

Urgyen holds that the World Mind is an evolving collective of minds that must grow in spirit as well as soul, and can be corrupted by evil.

A Polish Catholic biophysicist, born Jerzy, taken from his parents in Łódź as a child; he killed enemies and was tormented by it.

The former lama delivered a warning against using violence to Yuri and Tamara; the Lylmik see his coadunate sensitivity as rare among humans.

Dartmouth metapsychologist, wife of Glenn Dalembert, studied abnormal psychology of operants; she wrongly diagnosed Sunny's anxiety as depression.

Lucille regards Remillard's Coterie as a telepathic mind-worm collective that tries to recruit her and has recruited Donna Chan and Dane Gwaltney.

The oldest Coterie member, a Ford service manager and gifted auto diagnostician who enrolled at Dartmouth at thirty.

Found in June 1979 at Benson's Wild Animal Park, Glenn was the first Coterie member, a Dartmouth undergraduate who later championed metapsychic rights.

A 26-year-old Maine potato farmer who became the only Coterie member to choose physics.

Mitch Losier is a methodical seekersense adept who traced other suboperants, many of whom were drawn to Dartmouth to form the first North American operant nucleus.

An elderly invalid operant, nearly frightened into cardiac arrest by Denis and Rogi's telepathic greeting, so not recruited.

Rogi's name for the tactic of locating hidden operants by dowsing over maps with a forked witch hazel stick.

Pauline, seven, is Don's youngest child; Denis hypnotized her and found her telepathy had been suppressed by Victor.

Sally Doyle, from Troy, had a knack for finding lost things and entered Dartmouth in fall 1979 as valedictorian; she was the second Coterie member.

A faculty Denis developed through six months of dowsing practice, letting him perceive operant minds on maps and aerial photos as points of light.

A Puyallup tribesman and seventeen-year-old premed junior, a healer and soul-traveler who screened his mind and revealed himself after watching the Coterie for months.

Works at the Geophysical Observatory; confirmed a 2.4 magnitude tremor at 18:28 near Medeo.

Four-year-old telepathic daughter of Tamara and Yuri; affectionate toward Pyotr and says she felt the tremor too.

The psychic group's means of self-defense, involving 'terminations' of threats; Yuri hinted at it to Pyotr and Tamara wants no more.

Old Georgian psychiatrist, recently released from nearly ten years of exile in Ulan-Ude, now living in Alma-Ata with his daughter's family.

Japan was the only people to experience atomic bombing, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and has called for the elimination of nuclear weapons.

The Charter was signed in San Francisco on 26 June 1945.

Prime Minister of Japan who addressed the UN General Assembly on 23 October 1985.

An old gray saltbox building housing Remillard's parapsychology laboratory, which Lucille sees as sinister.

Dr. Sampson, called Doctor Bill, is a psychoanalytic counselor and former Dartmouth middle linebacker ('56 team); he skeptically but sympathetically hears Lucille out.

Lucille's father, a former aspiring concert pianist, has a sclerosis illness and uses a wheelchair; his Steinway grand burned in the fire.

Lucille considered transferring to Rivier College to live at home in Nashua but decided against it.

A self-propelled tree harvester able to shear two-foot trunks in one bite; it starts itself with an empty cab and charges Don.

Lute is a huge Swede who restrains Don at the Blue Ox and lays him in a pickup to sleep it off.

Project Cork is a nationally famous institute for alcoholism study with a detox clinic at Dartmouth, in Hanover.

Pelletier owns the Blue Ox, tends bar, and cuts Don off before ordering him to leave.

The voices mock Don, urge Victor to get rid of him, and may be hallucinations from alcohol and paranoia, or real telepaths.

Creativity lets operants shape space, time, matter and energy fields; Lucille's materialized mouse simulacrum registered a mass gain of 0.061 micrograms on the electro-balance.

Rogatien's former love, now over fifty, at Boskone with her daughter Annarita; she is now married to Gilbert Anderson III after Stanton died.

A meteoroid killed six workers and destroyed the station's orbital velocity; it could not be restored, so the United States chose to blow it up.

The disaster threatened the Scheme by altering probabilities; Unifex intends to restore the original coefficients of the sexternion.

Forbid the Lylmik from overtly protecting Earth, such as with a guardian vessel to deflect space debris.

Soviet citizens celebrated with dancing in the streets and demand that MacGregor's proposal be implemented.

These three takeover firms specializing in leveraged buyouts are secretly owned by Kieran's group; he now intends to use them to buy defense contractors.

Congress Tower is Chicago's most prestigious new office building, housing Kieran's 104th-floor office.

Finster is a former Nevada casino mentalist turned confidential agent of Kieran, who has secured a pipeline into the Armed Services Committee by blackmailing Senator Scrope.

Kieran uses his farsense to perceive distant people's thoughts and emotions, such as lovers on a sailboat and people on a cruiser.

The law legalizes marijuana and cocaine and decriminalizes other drugs, with education, compulsory treatment and capital penalties for outlaw dealing; it will cost the Mafia much income.

Scrope is the Republican Senate Minority Leader, described as bought and paid for by Kieran's circle, smart but a nerd.

The Mafia Commission met in Kansas City and voted Kieran his seat as Acting Boss of Chicago.

Viola is a heavyset blond operant in her late forties, Kieran's best operant head-hunter, who vetted the campaign personnel for loyalty.

Roe-bear is a middle-aged Montréal telepath who leads a small Québec gang and is terrified of Victor while pledging loyalty.

Denis Remillard's 1990 book integrated all mental activity, showing higher mind functions are inherent in all humans, with operancy or latency varying by talent and inhibition.

In late 1990 it revealed the US Defense Department pressured psychic researchers into classified projects, causing the first anti-meta shift in public opinion.

The rental agent who showed Rogi the Gates House corner shop and left him alone in it.

A key ring with a silvery chain and a red glass marble fob in a wire cage, found by Rogi in the gutter.

Minou is an Abyssinian kitten with whom Lucille has a genuine mental linkage; the kitten amplifies her materialization of a mouse through predatory excitement.

Vigdis is a thirty-six-year-old visiting research fellow from the University of Oslo and a psychocreativity specialist who mentors Lucille; her own psychic talents are unexceptional.

Xiong Ping-yung's dynamic-field theory is expected to link metapsychic phenomena to physics and underlies a Cambridge proposal for psychophysical energy transfer.

Alana is Jamie's most talented EE adept, with green eyes; she had a premonition of disaster after a trip to Tokyo and urged precautions.

CIA agents tried to buy or recruit Nigel, hinting at coercion by alternatives like Negev or Semipalatinsk facilities, and spoke of MI5 and other agencies.

A burly, fair-haired man in a duffel coat who pulled Jamie away; he seemed to know Jamie was in danger and said 'We'd really hate to lose you.'

Jean is Jamie's wife; she calmly proposes a counter-strategy of demonstrating EE to Whitehall and spying on embassies, and thinks intelligence services don't mean harm.

A strongly operant man who used mental compulsion to lure Jamie into a close and aimed a narrow tube at him with murderous intent.

Gimel, a stout, placid PRD director, asks whether MacGregor can be deterred through influence or his personal life.

Reichenbach, a frail, ill old PRD director, considers MacGregor the greatest menace to civilization and orders Maurer to stop or delay the demonstration.

Madame Boudry is the only woman on the PRD and asks whether MacGregor has radical political affiliations.

Maurer is a confidential agent who investigated MacGregor's research for the PRD and reports its findings to them.

The PRD is the banking regulatory board of Switzerland, made up of eleven men and one woman.

Widespread psychic espionage would end Swiss banking confidentiality and expose financial transactions worldwide to public scrutiny.

At its close, Jamie MacGregor said the University's independent team of thirty-two EE adepts was already working and would release U.S. and Soviet military secrets.

Losier and Tremblay run the main operancy test program at Dartmouth.

The Odd John Effect is the potentially fatal dichotomy between Homo superior and normal humanity; hope that normals might gain mind-powers is the only sure escape.

Tater McAllister is a theoretical physicist with a wacko sense of humor, husband of Sally Doyle.

Watson is the University of Edinburgh Medical School's director of media relations who introduces MacGregor at the press conference.

Meeting Sakhvadze invites scientists and journalists to hold in Alma-Ata the following September; Jamie accepts.

Kemp is a Stanford Nobel Laureate brain researcher who publicly defends parapsychology and takes part in the San Francisco transmission.

Hannula is a cold-ridden KGB agent posing as a Finnish journalist; his thoughts reveal the GRU had a failed plan to kidnap MacGregor.

Arkhipov, the London KGB resident, keeps watch outside Jamie's house, apparently to ensure no rival faction tries a kidnapping, since Russians and Americans have ruled it out.

Albert hosts the Late-Late Talk Show on KGO-TV, San Francisco, which broadcasts the closed transmission.

Russian operants tend to be antiestablishment peaceniks, their program purged of GRU/KGB heads, since elitist operancy is suspect under Marxist dogma.

Psi-Eye is the scheme revealed at Edinburgh, tied to EE operants, to end the nuclear arms race by observing weapons.

The KGB's Dankov demanded the liquidation of Tamara and her cadre after the Edinburgh Demonstration but was made to see reason.

He travelled personally to Alma-Ata to meet Tamara, showing a populist style and shrewdness in handling nonconformist scientists.

He pushed the Defense Council for a pre-emptive nuclear strike; this remains an option if the Soviets lack an adequate EE inspection team.

The Politburo voted down the militarist proposals for now, knowing the public mood would not permit a first strike or harm to the psychics.

Tamara is a red-haired psychic scientist at the Institute for Bioenergetic Studies who leads the Soviet EE adepts and personally took part in the Edinburgh Demonstration.

In November 1991 CBS's 60 Minutes devoted an hour to interviewing Denis and touring his Dartmouth lab, including testing of anonymous operant subjects.

Baumgartner's campaign attacked the Meta Brain Trust's influence on the Democrats, using terms like metacoercion and redactive probing, which boosted his polls.

Baumgartner is a retired USAF brigadier general, former Moonwalker and CEO of McGuigan-Duncan Aerospace, ambitious and secretly resentful, who is offered the 1996 Republican presidential nomination.

The battered SALT treaty was updated and promised to the world as a Christmas present after the Psi-Eye plan was delivered to Washington and Moscow.

Moreno is a 60 Minutes reporter known for hard-hitting questions; he presses Remillard on the dangers of an operant elite.

Remillard's lab is in a dilapidated gray saltbox building in New Hampshire, previously closed to reporters.

Everyone is latent to some degree, varying by power; there is no hard line between latency and operancy, and training only helps those with strong latencies.

Individual slime mold cells forage separately, but when food runs out they join into a multicelled mass that migrates, then releases spores that revert to single cells.

It granted Remillard's lab ten million dollars to study how ordinary people might learn mental feats.

Fanatics smuggled the second Armageddon device into the Israeli nuclear weaponry works at Dimona; two devices are now in place.

The Carp beat the Mets 5-4 in the seventh game on a last-chance home run, winning the East-West planet series 4 to 3.

Pinch hitter Katsuyama hit a game-winning three-run homer off a wide pitch in the bottom of the ninth.

Veteran Mets pitcher O'Toole used delaying tactics in the ninth, but his wide pitchout was swatted for the winning home run.

Islamic Holy War terrorists exploded crude ten-kiloton bombs in Tel Aviv and Dimona in 1992, killing half a million and leaving over two million homeless.

Carezza is a slow, non-climactic form of lovemaking from Ume's part of the world, aimed at immersion rather than explosive release.

Dr. Sasaki, a parapsychologist, became a second mother to Ume, educated her, and made her her assistant in research on thought photos.

Rogatien found a mint, signed copy among thirty dollars' worth of estate-sale paperbacks; it is worth at least six thousand dollars.

The Human Polity is due to be admitted to the Galactic Concilium as a full voting member on January 6, ending the Simbiari Proctorship.

Ume is a Japanese visiting fellow at Dartmouth, an operant with a densely screened mind, who has manifested modest actinic radiation projection.

China resettled about 1.5 million displaced Muslim refugees in Xinjiang 'Lands of Promise' after the Armageddon strike.

Gavrilov stays in the orbiter module, relaying communications and scanning the Labyrinth while the surface team descends; he is the expedition's captain on the orbiter.

Kluchnikov is the commander of the surface exploration team and descends the canyon wall with Sturgis; he is entranced by the Martian organisms and takes one in his collection bag.

Ambient temperature in the fissure is minus seventeen Celsius, surprisingly warm for Mars.

Martian organisms form a glistening, color-changing film on rocks; others are radially symmetric, glowing blue forms that corrode stainless steel and vanadium-steel blades.

Fog fills the fissures of the Labyrinth; the team finds ice and liquid water on the rocks deep in a fissure, possibly warmed by a thermal vent.

Sturgis speaks of loving Ruth in his last words, suggesting she is someone dear to him.

Sturgis is the American geologist of the surface team; he grows wary of the organisms and tries to warn Kluchnikov.

Bonding is a process by which Kieran makes psychics utterly loyal to him; his household staff are bonded.

The Command Post is Kieran's locked, armored third-floor study, opened by his handprint and voice, a fortress with armored windows. Few besides Kieran and Arnold Pakkala have entered.

Windham of Research/Market/Data is one of two political advisers O'Connor provides to Tremblay's campaign.

Shannon's term for Kieran's circle of psychic associates, including Jason, Arnold, Adam, Lillian, Ken and Neville, who have all suffered as a persecuted minority.

Garrett runs a media liaison agency for top people in both parties and is offered to Tremblay's campaign.

The committee predicts Persian Gulf oil cutoff, depression and global disorder, and chooses a tough conservative candidate to exploit the crisis.

David is Jamie and Jean's child who, with Katie, uses repeating TV jingles as a thought-screen.

Katie, daughter of Jamie and Jean, has had the Sight, which frightens Jean.

The radar-invisible coating, which the Americans refuse to hand over, is being hunted by Jamie's team for five months; the Americans and Russians are testing them.

A religious fanatic who shouts Biblical condemnations of witches, kills Alana and Jean with a machine pistol, then dies burned in Greyfriars churchyard.

Held in Edinburgh in 1994; Nigel, charged with homicide, attended but presented no paper.

Landa's fourth planet was surveyed long ago as a promising colony prospect, but a nearby supernova's blast wave irradiated it two Galactic millenaries earlier.

Dota'efoo is a senior Krondak planetologist with the rank of Comparator, and mate of Luma'eroo Tok.

Humans are extremely fecund and overpopulated, controlling population through famine, abortion, infant mortality and war; they have explored a neighboring red desert planet and built orbital habitats.

The survey vessel is a dull-black spheroid using an upsilon-field translator for hyperspace and a rho-field for inertialess flight.

Landa is a golden-yellow Gi-class sun with fourteen planets on the Orion Arm's outer fringe, about 6360 light-years from Molakar.

Luma'eroo is a senior Krondak planetologist with the rank of Attestor, and pilots their survey ship.

Krondak Tau-Ceti world and site of the Eleventh Sector Base, less than twelve lightyears from Earth; staging point for the Great Intervention.

Bookseller friend of Rogatien who feared him as a metapsychic, picturing Nero's human torches, until he soothed her mind.

Elaine's husband, the Third, a vice president and chief corporate legal officer, dressed as Dracula at the convention.

Twenty-one-year-old twin who died with her sister Laurette and younger sister Jacqueline in a January 1995 car crash after a ski weekend.

Bookseller who secretly resented and feared Rogatien's supposed mental coercion while selling him a copy of World D.

Amazonian housekeeper from Montréal hired by Victor with high references and a large salary to live in Sunny's house.

Operant crook who married Yvonne in 1996 and helped Victor build Remco; his mother dominated Sunny as nominal housekeeper.

The rescuer suppresses his aura and communicates telepathically, letting Victor believe Rogi knocked him out; he is familiar with Rogi and says they will meet again.

Eighteen-year-old compliant sister whom Victor intends to match with his associate Robert Fortier.

Brother Ernest is an Alabama TV evangelist who preaches that operants are the vanguard of Antichrist and that the Last Judgment is five years away.

Concord is the capital of the Human Polity, with most offices in an underground complex called the Ants' Nest; Earth's population nears nine billion.

Denis's unnamed brother is a metapsychic criminal who deliberately suppressed the mind-powers of younger siblings and killed three sisters who defied him; Denis knows this only through mind-reading.

Magnate-Designate suspected by Van Wyk of being a closet rebel; also a suspect in a murder investigation under Magistratum surveillance.

Anne is the only unmarried Remillard sibling and an Intendant Associate with ice-blue eyes.

Cat refused the magnateship because it would force her to abandon the Child Latency Project and her research partnership with Brett.

Rory's daughter, an engineer who supervises the armlann; Rory addresses her as Síondaire.

Maurice is fourteen, finishing a B.A. at Dartmouth, and considering philosophy before medical school.

Philip is Denis and Lucille's eldest son, ten in 2007, and was dressed as an imp for Halloween.

Four-year-old Severin, nicknamed Sewy, helped make the spaghetti worms prank.

Araña is an unfrocked Dominican from Madrid who founded the antioperant movement Hijos de la Tierra; he is arriving in New York to be used by Kieran's group.

Presteigne performed the posthypnotic suggestion on Baumgartner during dental work and would know how to simulate an eye ailment.

The First Lady arrived late to her husband's second inauguration after flying from the bedside of her sick two-year-old granddaughter.

Griffith is chairman of Roggenfeld Acquisitions, one of Kieran's principal strategists, and host of the election-night gathering in his Manhattan townhouse.

The Grand Mufti was assassinated in Tashkent when his head burst into flame entering the Barak-Khana Mosque, sparking riots and blame on metapsychic operants.

Kamil is a young Tadzhik Muslim KGB agent of the Twentieth Directorate who monitors the foreign delegates' moods at the Congress and reports to Sergei.

The delegates' minds mesh spontaneously into metaconcert and strike Finster dead as he approaches the General Secretary.

The mind-buster is Finster's projection of sensory confusion, which he plans to use on the people on the platform.

The silvery cylinder fires nearly silent poisoned needles; Finster uses it to kill the four KGB agents.

The General Secretary's policy of openness, which depends on the KGB Twentieth Directorate's EE monitoring, and showcases operants; Moscow opponents try to discredit it.

Sergei is a KGB colonel held under Finster's coercion, posing as part of the General Secretary's bodyguard.

The Congress is held in Alma-Ata in September 1997; the Seventh is planned for Boston the following year.

The alien defrictionizer, labeled in Samish, made Marcie's sled runners much faster and let her win.

Fred is a young Poltroyan psychogeomorphologist on his first xenosurveyor assignment, studying operancy and proximity to granitic lithoforms.

Marcie Nyberg is a petite blonde sled-dog racer who won her heat with the Poltroyans' wax, and she wears a Sons of Earth button.

Number 22, a Malamute handler named Jer, wears a Sons of Earth button and reacts violently to being accused of telepathy.

Fred and Willy keep a secret base camp in Waterville Valley.

Willy is Fred's colleague; he gave Marcie an alien defrictionizer and posed with Fred as a Samish Laplander.

George, nineteen, studied computer technology under Victor's orders. He killed Pauline and himself with a shotgun to spare her the arranged fate, leaving a note.

A patented bacterium, stolen from a Michigan university, that converts pulpwood waste into valuable chemicals; Remco lacked capital to develop it itself.

Louis and his twin Leon are sixty-two, balding and middle-aged looking, and serve Denis dutifully caring for Victor.

Remco grew into an international operation via metapsychic racketeering, owning pulpwood firms, a New Brunswick paper mill and a Maine chemical plant.

Operant delegates at Alma-Ata incinerated the General Secretary's assassin through psychoenergetic projection, an act that alarmed the world more than the murder itself.

The green-skinned Simbiari govern humanity as Proctors, guiding its maturation; Poltroyan auxiliaries enjoy seeing Paul outwit them.

Daddy is afraid of Victor while also attracted to him, and will wait rather than act against him.

Tuckerman Ravine is a glacial cirque on Mount Washington, filled with over twenty-five meters of snow this winter; winter skiing there is prohibited and deadly.

At the new year, fireworks burst above Wildcat's slopes and skiing torchbearers send a river of golden light downhill.

Zap-Star is a satellite laser-mirror defense system, 150 battle-mirrors and twenty ground batteries, run by UN peacekeepers from Christmas Island; completion expected late 2013.

Law prohibiting operants from seeking public office or serving on law-enforcement bodies; the Supreme Court is debating its constitutionality.

Elderly Swedish scientist of the Karolinska and a Nobel Committee member, who warns Gerry that others will use him, and claims to have suggested the germ of Xiong's theory.

Young Swedish monarch who presents the prizes; she stands to honor laureates as mental royalty and jokes with Xiong.

Xiong's theory incorporating life and mind into the mathematical fabric of the universe.

Senator Benson was once O'Connor's protégé but O'Connor now calls him a religious nut who pushed Baumgartner toward antioperant policy.

O'Connor says the old Brain Trust was too academic and elitist, so reviving it must go slowly.

O'Connor describes the Left-Hand Path as an old neglected way that annihilates the Light and leads all into the void.

Two-year-old granddaughter of the Baumgartners; her convulsions were not epilepsy but a spontaneous breakthrough from latency into metapsychic operancy, per Johns Hopkins neurologists.

The inauguration was held indoors for the first time since 1985 because of a raging blizzard.

Dupuis is the Chief Chemical Engineer who opens the valve to release the first fuel at the ceremony.

Bacteria in vats digest pulpwood to produce this fuel; after production and distribution problems were solved, the first batch ships to Europe.

Dr. Fairweather, an elderly operant from the University of Virginia, opened Tremblay's mind and confirmed Amanda's accusation; her evidence was inadmissible at trial.

Laura, born to Shannon five months after Gerry's release, was destined for a spectacular role in the private life of a future Magnate of the Concilium.

Congress repealed Article XXII in May 2007, ratified by October, freeing Baumgartner to seek a third term and threatening O'Connor's plans.

Passed by Congress in 2012, it would allow criminal defendants to be mentally cross-examined by three forensic redactors, but was not ratified before the Intervention.

Sada's captain; cynical and informal, doubts the display will distract the Soviets and fears Earth is running out of time.

Executive Officer of the Sada; uses a pressor to push the helicopter away from the rho-field coronal zone.

Simbiari observation vessel whose crew sacrificed themselves a hundred years earlier at Tunguska, keeping its failed ship from impacting Saint Petersburg and sparing humans.

Simbiari Oversight Authority flagship, leading twenty-six observation vessels that hover openly six hundred meters above the Tunguska taiga in daylight on 20 June 2008.

Site of the Risstimi event, with flattened trees radiating outward in an ellipse.

The Wuhan device is a generator that raises a mirrored dome around a psychic operant, blocking even Denis's farsight; its power is shown during a test.

Saucers over Siberia on the Tunguska anniversary were filmed in detail but dismissed as a hoax; later sightings drew little interest.

A Chinese university metapsychology lab in Wuhan houses the mind-screen experiment, with a barber-chair like Dartmouth's.

Kieran venerates the dark goddess Kali, whose vision (a black-petaled wheel with fire at its heart) Victor glimpses but does not recognize.

Presteigne says Kieran does not rate highly in the redactive metafaculty, and that self-redaction is the least-understood part of metahealing.

The aether is a six-dimensional entity in which mental impulses propagate, rather than in four-dimensional space-time.

McCarthy, an associate of Vicks at Princeton, suggests the six-dimensional sigma-field might mesh with the aether to block telepathy and other mental powers.

China is speculated in the West to be secretly working on a thought-screen, amid a more defensive posture toward the Soviet Union.

Dr. Vicks developed the sigma-field mechanism for the MIPPFUG project and foresees roofs, meteor-barriers, radiation shields and tractor beams based on sigmas.

MIPPFUG is a small proton-proton fusion generator that uses a sigma-field bottle instead of electromagnetic currents to contain the fusion reaction; its demonstration confirmed a long-awaited breakthrough.

A sigma-field is a six-dimensional force-field-like entity bound into space-time, acting as an invisible wall against heat, energy, or even matter.

The Village is a corner of O'Connor's estate where bonded domestic, security and grounds staff live.

A redactive probe cannot be done at long distance and requires in-person access; success depends on the subject's psychological tone.

Hiroshi, a Japanese operant and Ume's countryman, joined Tamara and Zhen-yu in abandoning Urgyen's nonaggression ethic.

Programmable liquid-crystal reader-plaques have destroyed printed periodicals and threaten book publishing.

Zhen-yu argued at Oslo that operants must defend themselves and their countries with mental as well as physical force.

Glaçon is an enormous pewter-gray albino moose with translucent white antlers and glowing eyes; the name means ice cube or cold-hearted devil.

Pete Laplace is Victor's caretaker, descended from voyageurs and Abnaki, with farsight and coercion; Victor calls him his best farsensor, though his IQ is about eighty-six.

Jasper is the hotel's current convention manager, who pitches the Summit Chalet banquet at ninety dollars per head.

The Ghost says the Mind of Earth must coadúnate, growing together in goodwill, to compel the Intervention of the Galactic Milieu.

A trifoliate restaurant with armor-glass windows built on Mount Washington's summit after the antenna farm was demolished; it is over budget and not yet paying its way.

Sewy and others discuss the Ethic of nonviolence, questioning whether operants should refuse to defend themselves mentally, as in Russia.

Jamie MacGregor demonstrated the first aura detector, which measures a person's degree of operancy; Denis Remillard's ten-year-old son sent it off the scale.

Art Gregoire is the hotel's Security Chief.

Victor, O'Connor and Rogi ride a dark steam train up toward the Summit Chalet, stopping on Jacob's Ladder to await aircraft.

After the coach derailed and toppled onto boulders, the engine braked to a stop before the damaged track and a figure jumped from its cab.

A powerful unfamiliar mind led hundreds of minds in firing psychocreative fireballs; the strike on the train faltered and derailed the coach instead of the engine.

Two unlit domestic transport aircraft, half the size of the Congress delegates' ferries, approached Mount Clay to land armed attackers.

Zhao Kud-lin is a Chinese delegate who argues operants must be politically active to deal with such vermin.

Denali is a wintry, stormy planet with gallium ore deposits, now also a popular ski resort; it has no native sapient life.

The Lylmik device eases the pain of hyperspatial translation but is not yet appropriate for general use among the Milieu's client races.

Ice crabs are eight-centimeter hotblooded grotto dwellers who steal from human campers and scavenge their leftovers, such as Rogi's cheddar.

Rogi's Memoirs will need a retrospective digression and Unifex's help; Philip and Lucille's autobiographies already cover the Proctorship years.

Scarlet onion-like sessile carnivores that nibble at bathers; Unifex restores them after Rogi's splash distresses them.

The park is named for its subnivean caves, melted from the icefield by geothermal springs; visitors may not dig into them.

The dream voice offers Marc the chance to become Mental Man, an angelic being of pure Mind more powerful than the Lylmik.

Aurelie and Cheri have meager metapsychic powers and were exonerated by the Magistratum.

Brett is Cat's husband and research partner. He developed the redactive programming for raising latent children to operancy.

Cecilia is a neurosurgeon who married widowed Maurice Remillard seven months ago; this is her first Good Friday ritual.

Cheri, twenty-three, is the youngest Remillard spouse and is pregnant; she thinks the family is coercing Victor to die.

Each Good Friday since 2016 Denis links the family's minds in a coercive metaconcert; Denis does the praying. Some suspect it is guilt compensation.

Maeve is pregnant, resentful of Remillard demands for babies and of Denis's ritual, and calls Teresa the Prima Donna.

Mrs. Gilbert is Victor's nonoperant day nurse and says Doctor Cournoyer wants to discuss his deterioration with Denis.

Philip is the eldest Remillard sibling and the shrewd CEO of Remco Industries.

The Reproductive Statutes sharply restrict artificial gestation, which is technically possible, though it may be used to populate ethnic planets.

The estate on Upper Hillside Drive is an ugly pseudobaronial mansion built in the 1930s, Victor's home since 2009 and his place of exile since 2013.

Premium superluminal transport that carried Marc from Okanagon to Earth in three days, exhausting his personal credit allowance.

Nearest human cosmop world to Caledonia at nineteen lightyears; a Milieu Sector Base and home of the Twelfth Fleet.

Teresa's five-month fetus communicates in an unusual thought-mode; Marc touches its mind and it seems to have expected him.

Alexis is Perdita's son and Marc's best friend, an ordinary genius swinging between idealism and fascist tendencies.

Luc inherited the harmful mutation but could be repaired to near-normality; Madeleine is a carrier but unaffected.

Perdita is a low-level operant who works at the bookshop; she is unaware that Marc reads most of her mind.

Matthieu was Marc's twin and actually the firstborn; he died at birth.

Rimsky-Korsakov's dark fairy tale opera with a disturbing ending was Teresa's signature role, as Snegurochka.

Moti Ala is a Simbiari Enforcer Chief who, with Throma'eloo Lek, redactively interrogated Marc; she was left shaken and flustered.

The Reserve is a howling wilderness in the British Columbia mountains, guarded by rho-field neutralizers, warm-body detectors and other alarms; its only inhabitants are the megapods.

The Port Authority allows private vehicles only five minutes of parking at the departure gate before logging their tag number and requiring an explanation.

Rhocraft are egg-shaped inertialess flying vehicles that travel computer-controlled Vee-routes at high speed and altitude.

The authorities keep a short-term record of all vehicles on the Vee-routes, purged after three days.

Bill says the area has grizzlies, wolves, cats, mountain sheep and goats, a few moose in the lower valley, and Bigfeet.

Surrounded by steep mountains that foil all but close-up farscan scrutiny, making it a hideout for Teresa and Rogi.

Parmentier runs a fishing resort on Nimpo Lake, helped Rogi see Bigfoot at Ape Lake years earlier, and has a black box that cancels the Reserve alarms.

Parmentier's sixty-year-old internal-combustion floatplane can pass the rho-trap barrier, so it will carry the group into the Reserve.

After the Intervention the world's surviving 64 Gigantopithecus were resettled in the Reserve; by 2043 nearly two hundred, a Galactic Treasure with telepathic auras similar to operant humans.

Adrienne is the eldest daughter of Cheri and Adrien and bossily makes the family burn their barbecue leftovers in the beach fire.

The project, run by Cat and Brett in the Polity Education Ministry for seventeen years, raised over fifty thousand latent children aged five to nine to operancy.

Doolittle is Cat and Brett's modified Dutch trawler, kept at the Rye Harbor Yacht Club and now too small for their four children.

Gordo is Cat and Brett's eleven-year-old son. Cat fears he still has a metabigot complex that he hid from her.

Hydra is a resentful family member who secretly takes orders from the voice Fury and plans to harm the family, including bossy Adrienne.

Elected Assemblies govern planets day to day, passing local law and recommending policy matters to the Planetary Dirigent.

The cabin's roof has collapsed, its floor is rotted and the furnishings have decayed, though the walls remain mostly intact and the stove survives.

Mount Remillard is a glaciated peak at the western end of Ape Lake, so named only in the future.

Anna's nephew and Will MacGregor's cousin; he converted Will to the anti-Milieu cause.

European Intendancy Associate, xenologist at Cracow and politician, platonic friend of Davy MacGregor; suspected rebel.

Brilliant but low-powered, frog-faced, alcoholic cerebroenergetic specialist and Magnate-Designate; recruited by forced probe, he revealed other seditious operants.

Twenty-four-year-old psychophysicist and Magnate-Designate; probed and recruited into the rebel group.

Ragnar Gathen's sister, a spaceliner captain with rebellious sentiments who married Alan Sakhvadze.

Former concert violinist forced by Simbiari testing to become a dynamic-field physicist; later first President of the Academy of Commercial Astrogation on Assawompsett.

Senior captain in the Civil Interstellar Force and secret rebel; met Owen in 2050 at a performance of William Tell and submitted to his mind-probe.

Eccentric Frenchman who invented a time-gate through which non-operant humans could escape the twenty-first century.

Son of Davy MacGregor; converted to the rebel view by his cousin Alan, becoming the sixth rebel.

Inga is Ragnar and Oljanna's grandmother, a nonoperant who lent her ancestral summerhouse for the meeting and senses, without approving, what the group is planning.

A secret device giving more accurate mental analysis than human redactive probing; all conspirators were tested with it, and the rebels hope to keep it hidden.

Throma'eloo Lek is a Krondak Evaluator who assists the interrogation and reports to the Select Judicial Evaluation Committee at Concilium Orb.

A preemergent race that extirpated itself some forty-two Galactic millenaries ago; its killing technique resembles the McAllister murder.

Unifex introduces the human 'cup of fellowship' using Labatt's beer; Noetic Concordance enjoys its mild euphoria.

A logjam blocks Ape Creek's outflow from the lake, and Ape Canyon is too steep and cascading for easy passage by human or Megapod.

Le Pavillon is a four-by-six-meter pole-and-plass wigwam, the couple's home for four weeks. It later becomes a woodshed beside the cabin.

The woodzapper is a laser device that has made chain saws obsolete. Rogatien will not use it before September 1 because its steam could betray them.

The three-bloom blue orchid is the pride of Denis's collection; he cuts one flower and gives it to Catherine.

The Krondak ministry is expert in mind-probing; Denis suggests asking it for informal help designing a probe for Remillards.

Marie's farm near Hanover is where Denis and Lucille used to live; Marie hosts the réveillon this year.

Carioca Enclave is where Unifex sends Marc by transport capsule; Marc's Aunt Anne expects him back for dinner.

Twelve-passenger De Havilland S-211 owned by Guinness PLC from Grampian Town, Caledonia; Marc's chosen target, grounded by a supposed environmental fault.

A hard-drinking writer of popular science fiction who became a Rebel proponent; he is Dorothea's grandfather and a latent with unusable powers.

Herman is a tame ermine that came to the cabin, killed the wood mice, and listens to Teresa's music; she rewards him with Spam.

The Aquitania, a bunny-hopper ship, will carry Davy, Denis, and their party, leaving in two days and reaching Orb on 6 December.

Fred and his mate Minnie are Poltroyan teachers at Dartmouth, leaving for Earth in their fast private starship the next day.

Wife of Rory Muldowney, she has been Paul Remillard's lover for over a year, which scandalized the Poltroyans.

A powerful operant who recently married Davy MacGregor; she is pregnant, as the dinner toast to the embryo reveals.

Maria Owl is Socorro and Tom's daughter, who has been fending off trick-or-treaters at the President's House.

Minnie, a Poltroyan professor, is sympathetic to humanity's difficulties with the Milieu Reproductive Statutes.

Rory Muldowney, Dirigent of Hibernia, was Laura Tremblay's husband and is guest of honor and grand marshal at the party.

Hostess and wife of Dartmouth's president, from Campeche, she defused a social crisis by adding Colette Roy to the guest list to keep the Poltroyans attending.

Susan O'Brien cooked the mole de poblano served at the dinner.

President of Dartmouth who became one of Jack's dearest friends and let him roam the campus.

The vat is filled mostly with glycerin and psychoactive alkaloids absorbed through skin, which strip mind-screens; humans in it wear breathing masks.

Loga'etoo Tilk'ai, an unusually large Krondak female, hosts the children in Lurakal, providing jackets, a meal prepared by her three larvae, and exhibits.

Parni wonders who Fury really is, and recognises Celtic genes make this region a prime irruptive metapsychic focus.

Ponte di Rialto is a human enclave on Orb with a Grand Canal and living human gondoliers; Margaret and Davy have a new apartment there.

John Quentin is a blond, powerful metapsychic operant who probes Dee's mind-screen lightly on the ferry and claims a home on Islay.

The conspirators are scheduled to embark on this superluminal starship for Orb in a few days.

King Winter keeps his daughter in the frozen Northland but reluctantly lets her go among humans, warning of her fate.

Sun god of the opera's people, said to have withheld light and warmth from the land if Snegurochka had kept living.

Teilhard was a French Jesuit paleontologist who died in 1955 and the most famous human apologist for Unity; Anna calls him 'much more dangerous' than a hoaxer.

The Dirigent is the primary metapsychic official of a planet, accountable to the Galactic Concilium, independent of the planetary legislature, and acts as overseer and public advocate rather than administrator.

A split of Dom Pérignon, packed among Teresa's 'necessities', was chilled in snow and used to toast Jack's birth.

Kauai is the site of Teresa's parents' old place, where Teresa, Rogi and Jack will stay until the legal mess is resolved.

Boom-Boom is a muscular, ugly-handsome, charismatic coercer who became a Galactic Magistratum officer and Concilium member.

Elihu Peters of the Dean of Freshmen's office demands Marc see him in person about problems with his two-year dual-major accelerated honors application.

Eric, a bulky sophomore, probed Marc mentally and failed; he recognized the name Remillard.

The helmet gave Marc spurious mental imagery and countermanded orders; the chip tests fine and no cause was found, though it worked well on the drive to the farm.

Jack was originally diagnosed with three lethal genes; Luc was cured of such a condition by genetic therapy.

Marc's mother, hidden and believed dead, defied the Repro Statutes to bear Jack and is now back at the farm, under house arrest awaiting arraignment.

The nerve-bomb is a source of energy for a hostile mind, no longer sufficient as it needs operant lifeforce to metamorphose.

Pete is a highly organized creator-coercer and skilled bullshit artist, studied computer science and an MBA; Marc steered him from business.

Shig is a quiet biophysicist and grandmaster redactor whose work later showed how the Mental Man project could become practical.

The Directorate voted five to four against pardoning Teresa Kendall and Rogatien Remillard; Paul abstained.

An operant woman who disappeared while swimming at Wallis Sands Park on 29 May; her body was never found.

Inserting corrections into a fertilized egg was usually unsatisfactory in humans because of pleiotropy, and was judged too risky.

Widely used from 2040, it regrows organs and rejuvenates aging bodies, and permits modest genetic enhancement.

An operant young man who vanished from Hampton Beach Park a day after Schroeder; his body was never found.

Duggie and Caroline are sixteen and in a summer romance, slipping into the trees with a blanket.

Born in Namibia, Esi served on the African Intendancy and sits on the Human Directorate; she is a Grand Master Farspeaker and Creator, and is formally accepted into the Rebels.

Her death was officially blamed on a shark attack, but she was actually killed by Hydra, and her body was disintegrated and sunk.

Bart Ziegfield is an assistant to the Dirigent who escorts Rogi and Teresa to MacGregor's office.

Spencer Delevan is the senior attorney for Teresa and Rogi; the lawyers were barred from the meeting with the Dirigent.

A machine that determines whether examinees answer truthfully; operated by Drs. Van Wyk and Kramer, it was moved to the Dirigent's office for the Remillard family test.

The Twelfth Fleet, the first of three new human space armadas, is based on Okanagon under Owen Blanchard, with Ragnar Gathen as Chief Operations Officer.

The therapy had seemed to work for Jack through late 2052 but began failing in February 2053.

Malama, the aged Hawaiian cook at the Kendall house on Kauai, is a kahuna who taught Jack psychocreative tricks and told him to hide them until his selves were controlled.

Pine Park is an ancient evergreen woodland above the Connecticut River where Marc and Jack held their secret talks.

Proto-oncogenes are normal-seeming DNA that can become cancer-causing oncogenes when triggered; Jack's chromosomes had the fragility factor characterizing them.

Dobbin is a pensioned horse, used with Napoleon only at Christmas and Dartmouth Winter Carnival.

One hospital window glows red-orange like a setting sun, and fire engines are approaching.

Napoleon is a pensioned horse, used with Dobbin only at Christmas and Dartmouth Winter Carnival.

Five-year-old Norman, Philip's child, bluntly asked Jack about his condition and used deepsight to peek under the sheet, remaining calm.

Teresa's ashes were left in Keaku Cave, a lava cave near Olokele Canyon, because Malama said her dangerous Low Self must stay there for now.

The foundation funded the Teresa Kendall Opera House on Avalon, which opened in 2056.

Valhall is the least attractive of the four cosmop planets; the nurse who leaked Jack's case was sentenced to a ten-year work tour there.

Gordo is Marc's fourteen-year-old cousin, finishing at Brebeuf and entering Dartmouth next fall; he rides the old BMW Marc gave him.

Marc's Honda turbocycle has spiked wheels for ice and a CE control linked to his brain.

Miko Kitei is a female operant rookie who ranked first in the Junior time trials.

Rusty Ragusa is a nonoperant eighteen-year-old and last season's Junior winner.

MaxSec is the security company that secured Jack's hospital room with a sigma-field and provided the override code to firefighters.

The guard was coerced by a disguised intruder into deactivating the alarms and opening Jack's door, despite orders to admit no Remillard family member; his memories were wiped.

Most of Islay's former hardscrabble population emigrated to the 'Scottish' planet Caledonia.

An isolated, abandoned-feeling farm on Islay's northwest shore, once owned by relatives of metapsychic giant Jamie MacGregor; Fury sends the Hydra children there to hide.

Islay's natural suboperants are untrained in aggressive metafaculties and full of lifeforce; the Hydras see them as prey to feed on.

The o'o-a'a is the rarest nonretroevolved Hawaiian bird, black with yellow leg tufts; it lives only on Kauai.

Some young people, including some of Rogatien's kin, escaped the Pliocene Exile and then underwent initiation as conditional uniates.

Marc's E15 cerebroenergetic project is controversial and already marginal for operator safety; administrators are growing anxious about it.

Three masterclass metapsychics in Edinburgh are nearly finished with an adverse report on long-term CE operator safety that could halt creativity-boosting research.

Robert Strachan, with Viola Strachan and Rowan Grant, researches cerebroenergetics at Edinburgh; their findings could get the E15 shut down over operator safety.

Rowan Grant is Viola's sister-in-law who comforts Ken, insisting nonoperants matter to the World Mind and Galactic Milieu.

The SIE is a sub-millimeter synorganic computer and endocrine stimulator implanted in brain ventricles to boost mental abilities; improper tuning risks schizophrenia, seizures or death.

Mummie is an operant who, with meta therapists, has painfully tried to force Dee's latent powers out; she is stern and dismissive of the children's complaints.

The Macdonalds defeated the invading MacLeans after the MacLean chief fell, leaving three hundred MacLean bodies in the marsh.

The Dubh Sìth, a dwarf and unerring bowman, joined the Macdonalds and killed Big Lachlan MacLean and many MacLeans at Gruinart in 1598.

This illustrated book contains the story 'The Kilnave Fiend at the Battle of Gruinart'.

Dee believes an invisible, mute guardian angel protects her and keeps the dangerous powers in her mind's boxes from escaping.

Ken is Dee's brother, two years older, who cured his childhood asthma by self-redaction during a near-death experience. He is considered latent, with a puny mental screen.

Port Askaig is a steep little town of whitewashed stone buildings and flower beds, where the ferry docks.

Self-redaction is the healing metafaculty used on oneself; Dee uses it to command her body to stop seasickness.

Dee hates the ruined church at Kilnave and refuses to enter it, her unease strengthening there.

A dumbbell-shaped frontier continent on Caledonia with one city, Muckle Skerry, and no higher-education or metapsychic research institutions.

Ian and Viola's primitive, undercapitalized airfarm homestead at the head of a fjord in northern Beinn Bhiorach.

Ian Macdonald's crusty factotum, who called Dorothea Doro.

This sea-cleft with a cave is where the remains of Dee's mother, uncle and aunt were found.

Once the MacGregor family home near Sanaigmore, it is now a luxurious private home closed to the public.

An elderly man in a garish orange jacket, an official of the Galactic Magistratum, coerced Dee to stop and questioned her; her shield held.

Young was a forgettable, fictitious guardian figure for the Hydra children, perhaps a Fury sending, who rarely visited the farm.

Rod and Judith Campbell served as the Hydra children's cook-housekeeper and handyman until dying in a fiery groundcar wreck five years later.

Fitch is Paul's laconic Yankee cook.

Paul suspects Fury murdered the Scottish researchers to discredit CE safety research, or to make Marc's mind-boosting useful to Hydra.

A cascade from the Orb central system altered every vital-statistic database in the Milieu within twelve nanoseconds; the fudged data cannot be identified.

Late in 2077, surveyors confirmed an enormous high-pressure magma reservoir beneath Clyde, estimated to blow catastrophically within two to three years.

The Drumadoon Bay is a starship that leaves from Unst Starport and travels 533 lightyears to Caledonia in fourteen days of daily hyperspace jumps.

Dee fastens the diamond mask, a rhinestone pin, to her shirt.

Ewen Cameron, a white-haired man in a kilt, is a powerful telepath who tricked Dee into answering his farspeech to show her vulnerability.

The First Magnate and a Krondak official questioned Dee and wanted to probe her mind for clues about the killings.

Staring at hyperspace for long can cause dizziness and madness; experienced travelers turn away every few minutes.

Looyunuch anower are wild aerial plants floating about 6,000 meters up; they spark when touched by an unshielded rho-field. Farmers only harvest them.

Lowrie is an operant geochemist immigrating to work in Caledonia's fullerene processing cooperatives.

A minidoser is a small green pillow-shaped device with a needle that injects a sleep drug letting nonoperant children avoid pain in hyperspace, but it turns off the mind-screen.

Callies is what Caledonian citizens call themselves; caladh means safe haven in Gaelic.

Tiny grazing creatures that feed on airplants and clog flitter intakes; sky-wolves prey on them and can attack pilots on flitters.

Flitters are hydrogen-balloon harvesters with air-jet maneuvering and a cockpit below; rhocraft cannot be used to harvest airplants.

The C-shaped gold necklet has two facing dragon heads with crimson pearl eyes and diamond-holding teeth; Masha deems Kyle a fool for it.

Graeme Hamilton is an old, intrepid official working at Dirigent House to keep Caledonia loyal to the Milieu.

Old World salvage archaeologists who have dug fossils near the farm for nearly half a year before Ian levels the site for a warehouse.

Portknockie is a colorful pearling town on Strathbogie where the family stops for lunch.

Dee's new mindpower is a redaction she calls her 'red comfort', which soothes another person's mental pain.

A Poltroyan enclave of Orb with ornate decor, simulated winter landscapes, giant trees housing homes and robotic yingi-drawn sleighs.

This starship, with a df of 180, carried Rogi and Marc's four friends to Orb in 2063.

Fred's wife and a Poltroyan magnate; she is stuck in extraordinary Concilium committee sessions on the morality of creativity enhancement.

Patricia is the recently appointed Dirigent of Okanagon and challenges the Poltroyans to show what Unity entails.

Telonis is a small golden white dwarf, tampered with by the Lylmik, ringed by a faint green nebula; stable for six million years.

Antlered, jackalope-like Poltroyan traditional draft animals; the robotic ones pull sleighs in the enclave.

Lynelle used the diamond as a focus, its light overwhelming Marc with pleasure and pain during the mental union.

Perlmutter, former Dirigent of Okanagon and foe of the Rebels, died when a courier ship's fusion generator malfunctioned.

Gavin Boyd, fifteen, is the oldest nonborn fosterling; he is jealous and cruel to Dee after losing The Big Cheese and being demoted to bin-flitter.

Nonborns are children gestated in laboratories from anonymous donors' gametes to build Caledonia's population quickly.

Sorcha MacAlpin is a kindly, massive resident pilot who helped teach Dee to fly and helps her into her flight suit.

The Big Cheese is Ian's oldest aerostat, a yellow, patched, wedge-shaped dual-purpose harvester and storage flitter used for training.

Torachan are dangerous aerial predators, reported near Ben Fizgig, that can rupture flitter envelopes.

Fiery young Intendant General of Caledonia, not yet a magnate, who is ignorant of the Fury-Hydra affair.

First Deputy to Caledonia's Dirigent and likely successor to Graeme Hamilton; she opposes secret CE manufacture while Hamilton remains in office.

Special Assistant to Okanagon's Dirigent Castellane, he is strikingly powerful for a non-magnate; he argues Rebels must win independence before humanity's coadunation, citing an anonymous source.

A shabby New Glasgow pub in the university district, named for an ancient magical rock near Glasgow on Earth; Kyle's favourite haunt.

Intendant General of Okanagon and a metapsychiatrist; he says Okanagon has thirty Rebel stalwart creators but is too closely watched for clandestine factories.

Caledonia's Metapsychic Institute lacks facilities to train young metas of very high assay.

A newly founded Japanese colony with an unsettled economy; a recent earthquake destroyed a city that must be moved.

An Teallach, the Forge, is an extinct volcano 7350 meters high, the highest point on the continent.

Dee's angel is a preprogrammed mental counselor and guide to her metafaculties, installed by someone unknown to her.

Cutach is a bobtailed miniature black filly, Dee's special pet, saved by Dee's nursing and secret redaction as a newborn.

Pigean is a fierce shaggy Highland bull that no other child could approach but who instantly became tame with Dee.

A teuthis is a huge tentacled decapod sea creature whose females bury homeothermous egg-cases on the shore; one buried a case outside Ian's boatshed.

Una MacDuffie is Dee's favorite tutor; she reveals the operant news was widely known in Tutorial House.

A small white-gold, Caledonian-diamond domino mask pendant, made by Dorothée as a reproduction of childhood costume jewelry; she wears it as a good-luck charm.

Marcel is Rogi's telepathic, food-cadging cat who adores potato chips and befriends Dorothée instantly.

The MPC, the total assay of higher faculties in a mind, is unique to each mature operant and cannot be altered by Fury.

Surya is a librarian at the Public Database and Rogi's lover in a no-strings affair.

CEREM is a large industrial park near the Snoqualmie River, making mental interface systems; its grounds are shielded from farsight by a fuzzer and defended with deadly force.

Dysergism is the phenomenon in which a sudden surge of fresh creative energy overwhelms a metaconcert design and makes it collapse.

Marc and Jack lubricated the fault zone with a creative injection of carbon, minimizing quake danger for many years.

The clown has Lek arrange the framed arrest of Clinton Alvarez, believing him part of Hydra, and plans to travel to Okanagon in his own starship.

Dee's name for the danger that Hydra minions may attack physically and individually rather than through detectable metaconcert.

Mikey is a boy of six or seven who wandered to the rocks by the Spouting Horn and lay unconscious, then was swept into the lava tube.

Spouting Horn is a famous Kauai blowhole where surf forced through an L-shaped lava tube erupts in spouts over 15 meters high.

The Directorate was recently founded to persuade humans of Unity's value; Paul's son Jon and sister Anne are prominent in it.

A priest at the church Anne frequents, kind to her in her distress.

Syrel is an artificial Lylmik enclave on Orb of glassy, pastel alien flora, meant to mimic the prehistoric Lylmik home world.

The Islay police inspector told Dee that remains of only a few of Hydra's earlier victims were ever found.

Inspector Chaimbeul told Dee that twenty-nine presumed victims of the Kilnave Fiend remained unaccounted for.

Dorothée wears the small diamond-mask talisman on a gold chain.

A diatreme is a cold gas eruption forming kimberlite pipes that blast deep-formed diamonds to the surface, explaining Caledonia's abundant diamonds.

An eruption of the reservoir would blot out sunlight with ash and gas, likely causing a Great Die-Off and forcing Caledonia's abandonment.

Jim MacKelvie is Caledonia's chief CE geophysicist; he fears the diverted magma would not stay coherent over three hundred kloms.

The directorate officially categorized Caledonia's situation as hopeless.

Caledonia's chief surveyor, he showed a holographic simulation of the reservoir and said conventional CE modification had 'not a prayer'.

Neelya, a CE operator from Yakutia, proposed diverting the magma sideways into the Sgeirean Dubha subduction region to form an island arc.

Jack's new starship crossed over five hundred light-years from Earth to Caledonia in two days; Rogi was its first passenger.

Tisha Abaka is a CE operator from Okanagon who arrived late, bringing the qualified operator count to eight.

A small lake sitting atop an ancient kimberlite pipe that runs through the Clyde craton down to the magma.

D-4 is the drill-rig Jack and Dorothea share; it descended through Windlestrow Loch and the kimberlite pipe to 168.2 km depth above the magma reservoir.

The plan separates volatiles from the magma reservoir under a lid held by Jack and Dorothea; it takes about fifty hours including ascent and descent.

The diatreme erupted through a vent over two kilometers wide, the largest of its kind on Caledonia, and spewed ice, rocks and about a ton of diamonds.

Marcel is Rogi's ten-kilo Maine Coon cat, who speaks telepathically and wants to go home to New Hampshire.

Tony and his wife Haunani are the Hawaiian caretakers of Elaine Donovan's house, Hale Pohakumano.

Held at the White Mountain Hotel at Denis's instigation, it was meant to be the metas' last annual convocation.

A hermaphroditic Gi composer who writes rudalma and is gathering memories for a rudalm about the deliverance of Caledonia.

A Gi art form: full-sensory virtual impressions of an event for operant audiences, accompanied by a Gi choir; popular with humans.

Diarmid ignores Dalembert's order not to energize, saying Marc's vitals are fine and that he is the boss.

Brilliant female Grand Master at CEREM who donated an ovary to the Mental Man project; all six of her natural children are GMs.

The rig would freeze every body part except the cerebral cortex to near absolute zero, bypassing the 300X helmet limit and turning the body into a superconductor.

Jeffrey Steinbrenner is CEREM's Director of Bionics and a neurologist; he suggested approaching the Keoghs and was less certain the rig would succeed.

A voice in Marc's REMsleep tempts him to father a new race, Mental Man, by mating with a genetically ideal woman, and gives him the brainstem solution.

Thierry Lachine is Marc's nonoperant houseman, now retired for the night, who maintains the Orcas Island house with robotics.

Jack and Dorothée plan a coercive-redactive metaconcert with the Dynasty to heal Denis of Fury, to be done at Marie's farm during Christmas réveillon.

The courier fell in uncontrolled full-power inertialess descent and struck the base's sigma shield at the tangent without cratering.

A psychosurgical implant in the limbic system making the subject placid and obedient, with slow speech and no sexual function; Caledonia has only a few hundred docilates.

A nonoperant former hop-lorry driver, he was convicted of a second aggravated rape after the diatreme; Dorothea finds he would reoffend and refuses commutation.

Unknown firm requesting import of two hundred C240 mind-interface units for Beinn Bhiorach; Dorothea orders a quiet investigation into suspected illicit CE equipment.

Executive assistant to the Dirigent, a holdover from Graeme Hamilton's administration, overfamiliar and fond of Scots dialect; Dorothea is extremely fond of him.

Deputy Dirigent of Caledonia, who will handle matters while Dorothea is away.

Arkady is Exotic Liaison Chief of the Twelfth Fleet, based on Okanagon.

Marc's egg is a black inertialess aircraft powered by a rho generator; it flies Rogi to the hospital in Colebrook.

A lakeside cabin in Pittsburg Township, New Hampshire, built by Victor Remillard and now used by the Remillard family, kept by caretakers.

Father Duval is a nonoperant Jesuit and Jack's favorite teacher at Brebeuf Academy; he officiates the nuptial mass.

The outspiral is a yogic exercise Rogi learned in youth that had saved him twice before; here it is turned into a lethal energy bolt.

Under Terekev and Arsanova it cracked down on the mafia, attracted investment and immigrants, and won a bid for fifty Bering-class colonization transports.

Lawai Kai on Kauai was bought by the Remillard Family Trust in 2073 and deeded to Jack; it is his permanent Earth home with a basement lab.

The thorny cereus flowers last only twelve hours; Diamond sees the thorns as guarding and reminding the couple.

Pu'u Kiloia is a promontory beside the bay, covered in thorny night-blooming cereus, with a small thatched hut at its center.

Cynophile Tower is a two-year-old residence popular with dog-loving legislators, with a large indoor promenade, eateries, and sanitation robots.

Hamish is Davy's aged Scottish terrier who communicates by mind-speech and loves his Sunday sausage.

Ignacy is Cordelia's shaggy Polish Lowland sheepdog, mischievous and greedy, who ate her blintzes.

A principle by which hardship and worsening conditions paradoxically accelerate evolution, physical, mental and moral; Unifex wants it introduced into the probability equation for humanity.

Fallback plan if the human–Milieu confrontation goes badly: Lylmik incarnation in bodies might provide a backup during the Metapsychic Rebellion.

The Keoghs are a ginger-haired brother-and-sister pair, hired away from Du Pont, who lead the shell project and are considered eccentric.

Angélique, Guderian's widow, made a fortune sending adventurers into Pliocene Exile.

The inn near Saint-Antoine-des-Vignes houses the only known temporal singularity in the galaxy, hosting Guderian's time-gate.

The Auberge du Portail is run by Madame Guderian and appears to be a place from which one can depart to the Pliocene Exile.

Sally rejected the narrator, who was deeply upset by it.

Sally is a rejuvenated brunette clinical psychologist who was an early operant mentor of Dorothée; she rebuffs Rogatien's drunken advances.

Milieu-loyalist metapsychologists in Paris claimed to detect spontaneous coadunation, a predicted prelude to Unity; Rebel theorists tried to disprove it.

Guderian invented the time-gate and lived at the cottage until he died in 2041.

The time-gate sends people one-way to the Pliocene, six million years back; anything returning arrives six million years old. Operant metapsychics are barred.

Denis's last book, published posthumously, became a potent weapon for Milieu-loyalist academics against Rebel theoreticians.

Bootleg CE helmets found in a hidden Caledonian factory were weapons, mental lasers, built with metacreative brainboards bought openly from CEREM.

The Great Divorce is Marc's planned separation of humanity from the Milieu; its timing is still problematic.

Jack and Dorothea live in a top-floor flat of the Palazzo Sagredo in Orb's Venetian enclave.

Paolo is the nonoperant concierge of the Palazzo Sagredo; he believes Jack and Dorothea are ordinary people and gives them a free anniversary dinner.

Cruifall is a harmless weather phenomenon of Loch Mór in which wind lifts red wormlike organisms from the sea and drops them with rain.

These one-to-two-centimeter blood-red or brown marine worms are slippery and crumble to dust when dry.

Three operant Hibernians, two men and a young woman, work for a fertilizer company and are paralyzed by coercive metaconcert, then killed.

Muldowney's private island about 25 km offshore, with rho-field dampers over its airspace and light security above a deeply buried, disguised weapons cache.

VIP-minder for the Intendancy of Connemara who sees the visitors off at Gaillimh and warns them about Hibernian wildlife.

A marine beast resembling a turtle crossed with a squid, over 20 meters long; protected in its sanctuary but fair game when washed ashore.

Chief elected official of Astrakhan, Terekev's body is now inhabited by the merged personae of Fury and Denis Remillard, with Fury in control.

Astrakhanian Dirigent with many Milieu loyalists in her agency; Lyudmila says she must be dealt with before the starship modification plan.

Rory's private arsenal on Inisfáil, supervised by his engineer daughter Cyndia, whose weapons are to arm the starships.

Tomás Daltún kept the arsenal for years before Cyndia and is now dead.

Cardinal McGrath, an operant Rebel cleric, disapproved of Marc but nearly declined, then concelebrated the wedding mass with Anne Remillard.

Led by Davy MacGregor, they enjoined CEREM and Marc from publicizing Mental Man or nurturing embryos beyond seven weeks pending the Concilium's decision.

Jackforming is a proposed forced acceleration of paramount maturation, combining regeneration-tank biotechnology with creative CE; some subjects would die but enough would survive.

Rosamund, Adrien's daughter, offered to contribute an ovary to Mental Man; her ovary is left in Steinbrenner's gestatorium by Fury.

Sam Ontaratu is a Sahtu Dene derelict who fought off Fury with a whiskey bottle, breaking his nose and breaking his concentration.

CEREM is a fortified Rebel facility in the mountains of Okanagon, protected by inertialess force-fields and sigma-fields, where Mental Man children were hidden.

Hyperactive Fetus Forty-Two with a dimpled chin like his father's; he throws tantrums demanding Reward and has learned to kink his umbilical cord to trigger alarms.

A surgical procedure on the fetuses that will greatly accelerate maturing of their metafaculties, sparing them Jack's ordeal of disincarnation; they must then learn to live bodiless.

An orca with a new calf, which Marc and Cyndia name Nuage.

Coercive Grand Master technician from Bloemendaal and designated foster parent of Mental Man, fiercely devoted to the babies; grieved when eleven fetuses died.

Director of the small Caledonian public-affairs Tri-D station that broadcast the debate to over ninety percent of viewers.

Pub on Strobcross Street serving fast-growing local fungi that diners cultivate and cook at their tables.

Rumored to be reintroduced by exotic Magnates of the Concilium; Poltroy would oppose it unless there seemed no alternative.

Trevor, the one infant brain nearly ready for independent survival, leapt from his tank but was killed by a single electrode charge.

Saastamoinen will lead skeleton crews to Astrakhan within twenty days to take over and ready the dreadnoughts.

Cible is the Rebels' new name for Diobsud's Satellite XV, a lifeless, near-Okanagon-sized moon chosen as a practice target for the metaconcert.

Olivia Wiley is standing ready as backup for the metaconcert.

The Rebel fleet's metaconcert drew on about seven hundred novice Grand Masters as a subrogate creativity generator, with 600X enhancers installed in the Vulpecula's former shuttle bay.

The device hidden in Cyndia's pelvis, triggered mentally, damaged Marc's reproductive organs painlessly at climax while killing Cyndia.

A Scrutator who assured Davy that no bombs or military equipment have been smuggled into Orb.

Krondak Starbase Governor at Molakar who declared the Krondak fleet's purpose privileged and refused to say whether Earth would be blockaded.

Loyalist human starships of these fleets are couriering messages to colonial worlds rather than deploying militarily.

The metaconcert collapsed when flashover injured its focusing team; the El8 helmet operators were killed and many 600X CE rig operators survived with brain damage.

Name Hanover loyalists gave to the day of the final confrontation, 27 May 2083.