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assimilated—if it hadn't been for the Irish.
    Ah, how we Franco-Americans hated the Irish! (You citizens of the Milieu who read this, knowing what you do of the principal human bloodlines for metapsychic operancy, will appreciate the irony.) Both the Irish and the French minorities in New England were Celts, of a passionate and contentious temperament. Both were, in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rivals for the same types of low-status employment. Both had endured persecution in their homelands and social and religious discrimination in America because of their Catholic faith. But the Irish were much more numerous, and they had the tremendous social advantage of speaking the English language—with a rare flair, at that! The Irish parlayed their genius for politicking and self-aggrandizement into domination of the New England Catholic hierarchy, and even took over entire city governments. We Francos were more aloof, politically naive, lacking in what Yankees called "team spirit" because with us it was the family that came first. With our stubbornly held traditions and French language, we became an embarrassment and a political liability to our more ambitious coreligionists. It was an era fraught with anti-Catholic sentiment, in which all Catholics were suspected of being "un-American." So the shrewd Irish-American bishops decreed that stiff-necked Canucks must be forcibly submerged in the great melting-pot. They tried to abolish those parishes and parochial schools where the French language was given first place. They said that we must become like other Americans, let ourselves be assimilated as the other ethnic groups were doing.
    Assimilate—intermarry—and the genes for metapsychic operancy would be diluted all unawares! But the great pattern was not to be denied.
    We Francos fought the proposed changes with the same obstinacy that had made us the despair of the British Canadians. The actions of those arrogant Irish bishops during the nineteenth century made us more determined than ever to cling to our heritage. And we did. Eventually, the bishops saved face with what were termed "compromises." But we kept our French churches, our schools, and our language. For the most part we continued to marry our own, increasing our homozygosity—concentrating those remarkable genes that would put us in the vanguard of humanity's next great evolutionary leap.
    It was not until World War II smashed the old American social structures and prejudices that the Canucks of New England were truly assimilated. Our ethnocentricity melted away almost painlessly in those postwar years of my early childhood. But it had prevailed long enough to produce Don and me ... and the others whose existence we never suspected until long after we reached adulthood.

4
SOUTH BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, EARTH
2 AUGUST 1953
     
    H E WAS ON his way home from the ten-o'clock at Our Lady, toting Sunday papers and some groceries Pa had remembered they were out of, when he got the familiar awful feeling and said to himself: No! I'm outside, away from her. It can't be!
    But it was. Sour spit came up in his throat and his knees went wobbly and the shared pain started glowing blue inside his head, the pain of somebody dying who would take him along if he wasn't careful.
    But he was outside, in the sunshine. More than six blocks from home, far beyond her reach. It couldn't be her hurting and demanding. Not out here. It never happened out here...
    It happened in a dark room, cluttered and musty, where a candle in a blue-glass cup burned in front of one Sorrowful Mother (the one with seven swords through her naked pink heart), and the other one lay on her bed with the beads tangled in her bony fingers and her mind entreating him:
Pray a miracle Kier it's a test you see he always lets those he loves best suffer pray hard you must you must if you don't there'll be no miracle he won't listen...
    The full force of the transmitted agony took hold of him as