Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (11 page)

The continent is roughly dumbbell-shaped, measuring some 1200 kilometers from north to south and 400 at its widest from
east to west. It lies a good 9000 kloms from Strathbogie, the nearest landmass to the southeast. In 2054 it boasted only a single municipality that could be dignified with the title of “city”—the state capital of Muckle Skerry on the southern coast. This place had a large biochemical plant, a brand-new shopping mall, a medical center, governmental and law enforcement offices, and a fast-proliferating gaggle of grog-shops, clip joints, bordellos, and recreational drugstores that catered to the hardworking miners, ranch hands, agriworkers, airfarmers, fisherfolk, and other dwellers in the sticks who egged into town on weekends to whoop it up in a civilized setting. There were no institutions of higher learning or metapsychic research in Muckle Skerry or anywhere else in Beinn Bhiorach. The other twenty-one permanent settlements of the frontier continent were very small, ranging from market towns and fishing hamlets to lonely trading posts in the interior mountain ranges. The only settlement within 300 kloms of Glen Tuath Farm was Grampian Town, population 2200, a center for barley-growing and the site of two important distilleries and a brewery.

Ian worked his holding with the help of seasonal contract workers, some of whom owned their harvesting aircraft. Viola, an energetic young woman, willingly took over the bookkeeping and purchasing, supervised the airfarm’s domestic robotics and ground personnel, and spent long hours transforming the bleak collection of prefabricated buildings into an oasis of dramatic beauty. At the same time, she gestated the couple’s first baby, Kenneth, who was born—regrettably frail of body and metapsychically latent—in 2055.

Like her mother-in-law Masha before her, Viola Strachan compensated for her disappointment in the nonoperant child by turning once again to neglected academic pursuits. The branch of psychophysics that had been her specialty involved a good deal of mathematical analysis that required no other equipment than her own talented brain and a computer with satellite-linkage that put her in touch with the University of New Glasgow. Through that institution, Viola could communicate with fellow researchers on worlds throughout the galaxy. Early on, she began to specialize in statistical cerebroenergetics, with a special emphasis upon the potentially injurious effects of mind-boosting equipment upon CE operators.

Ian was more than willing to have his wife resume her scientific career, even if it meant that he would have to hire a domestic manager to take over her erstwhile duties. He worshipped
Viola, finding it almost incredible that such an exceptionally talented woman would have agreed to marry him, bury herself in a colonial wilderness, and have his children. He was so deeply in love that he would have done almost anything to please her. For two years they seemed to be happy, in spite of the fact that little Kenneth was a sickly child who failed to thrive. The meta therapists in New Glasgow declared that there was no chance that he would ever achieve operancy, even though his intellect was exceptional.

Then Dorothea was born in 2057—also latent but quite healthy—apparently having a prodigious mentality, with truly extraordinary suboperant metafaculties that might conceivably be released if the appropriate stimuli were applied. Unfortunately, Caledonia did not then have the facilities to handle the baby girl’s case properly. For accurate evaluation and treatment she would have to be taken to Earth.

Viola was bitterly disappointed that this second child, like the first, was not an operant. She began to reassess her marriage and saw her handsome husband in a new, much less flattering light. It seemed clear to Viola that the meta shortcomings of their children were a result of his genetic input, and she felt increasingly stultified by the intellectual isolation of farm life as well. She became withdrawn and cool to Ian and began to exert her considerable coercive power upon him, urging him to sell the airfarm and return to Edinburgh with her and the children, so that their daughter at least might have a chance to reach her enormous mental potential.

Ian at first agreed. The farm was going through an especially rocky period and he was discouraged and overworked. He would be able to get some kind of job Earthside, and Viola had already been offered a good research position at her alma mater. But then Ian’s father Kyle Macdonald caught wind of what was about to happen, egged over to Beinn Bhiorach from Clyde, and in an impassioned man-to-man dialogue managed to change his son’s mind.

Viola was thunderstruck when Ian then flatly refused to sell Glen Tuath. All of Masha’s warnings about the impossibility of an operant woman having a successful marriage with a normal man now came home- to Viola. She finally looked at her husband with complete objectivity … and decided that she no longer loved him.

Less than a year after Dorothea’s birth, Viola Strachan told Ian Macdonald that she was going to divorce him. She returned
to Earth on an express starship, taking Kenneth and Dorothea with her. At first she moved in with her sympathetic mother-in-law Masha, who was then a full Professor of Clinical Metapsychology at the University of Edinburgh as well as a Magnate of the Concilium. Later Viola rented a townhouse of her own and the children were cared for during the day at a nursery school.

For the next four years Viola worked in the university’s Department of Psychophysics together with her older brother Robert Strachan and his wife, Rowan Grant, until all three of them were slain on a day that changed the history of the Galactic Milieu.

T
HERE WERE MANY OTHER TOURISTS AT
D
UN
B
HORAIRAIG BESIDES
Professor MacGregor-Gawrys and her party, but all of them were adults except Dee and Ken, and so the student archaeologist who was their guide pitched her lecture at a rather rarefied level. The dun was an ancient stronghold on a knoll high above the Sound of Islay. It had been extensively excavated and it featured a small museum with dioramas and exhibits in addition to the partially restored ruins. The two children liked the museum, but they soon became bored by explanations of the diggings and wandered off by themselves. Ken was eager to snoop through the rubble in hopes of finding some treasure that the scientists had overlooked. But Dee was feeling odd again, and all she wanted was to stand quietly at the edge of the parapet, staring down the long rough slope leading to the seashore.

Even in bright sunlight, with the expanse of water shining and birds warbling in the heather, she could not escape the feeling that something very bad was going to happen. By instinct, she connected the premonition with the strange aetheric atmosphere of Islay itself, which had made it seem so much more sinister than neighboring Jura when she had viewed both islands from the ferry. She had never felt this way before, and it was very unpleasant.

Closing her eyes, she set about to delete the disagreeable sensation with her new self-redactive faculty. She greeted the invisible, silent angel, took up the proper box, opened it, freed the soothing redness, and let herself float effortlessly upon it.

There, she said to herself. Now nothing can hurt me. It’s all right. Yes—

“Dee! Look at this! D’you think it might be ancient?”

The spell broke and her eyes flew open. It was Ken, holding what looked like a rusty bit of crinkled wire under her nose.

She gave a cry of consternation. “I was trying to use my new power and you spoiled it!”

Ken grimaced. “You fixing to upchuck again?”

“No! I just … feel funny.” She looked at him sidelong. “Don’t you get weird vibes from this place?”

“No.” He was clearly uninterested. “I’m going to show this doodah I found to the archaeologist. It could be important.”

Smoldering with indignation, Dee watched him go back toward the crowd of tourists. Boys! A grungy old piece of wire was important—but she wasn’t. It would serve Ken right if the terrible thing happened to
him.

But as soon as the thought passed through her head, she repented of it. Not Kenny, she prayed. Please, angel, don’t let anything happen to my big brother.

Her malaise was forgotten. She trotted off after him, calling: “Wait for me!” She caught Ken up just as the archaeologist was examining his find and pronouncing it to be a hairpin of late-twentieth-century vintage. The adults gathered round were laughing and Ken’s pale features had gone bright pink with embarrassment.

“Don’t fash yuirsel’, laddie,” said a stout middle-aged man wearing a marmalade-colored sports jacket and trews in the gaudy Buchanan tartan. He was standing with Gran Masha and the other members of the family. “Losh, at least yuir een were sharp enow to identify the wee whatsit as a human artefack. That’s verra commendable.”

Gran Masha said, “How kind of you to say so, Evaluator. May I present my grandson Kenneth Macdonald and his sister Dorothea … Children, this is Evaluator Throma’eloo Lek, who is a Visiting Fellow in Forensic Metapsychology at Edinburgh University. He is also here on a holiday visit.”

Dee said “How do you do” and shook the Evaluator’s very clammy hand. But Ken stared at him, dumfounded.

“Kenneth!” Mummie chided him. “Your manners.”

With great reluctance, the boy held out his hand. After the greeting had been exchanged, the Evaluator winked and said: “Noo, that wasna sae gruesome, was it?” Then he exchanged a few more jovial words with Gran Masha and took his leave, saying he was on his way to visit the usquebaugh works.

“What a surprise, finding him here,” Rowan said. They all began
heading back to their rented groundcar, a spacious blue Audi.

Robbie laughed. “Not really, when you consider that Islay is probably the most renowned producer of single malts on Earth. It would be odd if old Lek and his ilk
didn’t
make the pilgrimage.”

Ken was still looking shocked. Dee stared after the departing Evaluator. There was something creepy about him. But what? He looked very old, but lots of people didn’t want to be rejuvenated. Was it his fakey use of Scots dialect when he was obviously not Scottish at all?

“What do you say we follow Throma’eloo’s example?” Robbie suggested. “There’s plenty of time to visit the Bowmore establishment before we’re due at Finlaggan for this evening’s festivities. It would be a pity if we didn’t come home from Islay with a few well-aged souvenirs.” When his stern-faced sister looked as though she were about to object, he laughed. “Oh, come on, Vi. Lighten up. It isn’t as though the bairns were going to absorb the product by oz-bloody-mosis.”

“Unless the gene is dominant,” Viola said bitterly. “Oh … very well. If Masha can stand it, so can I.”

They climbed into the car, the professor spoke the destination, and they drove off. What with the strange old man and the incomprehensible byplay among the adults, Dee felt totally mystified. But Ken was sitting in the front seat between Mummie and Gran and there was no way she could question him about what was going on without the grownups hearing, and she was too proud to admit her ignorance to them. So she sat back and looked out of the window while the car traveled at a sedate pace along the narrow roads, heading southwest and eventually reaching Lochindaal, the great arm of the sea that nearly divided Islay in two. The threatening feeling Dee had experienced at the dun had vanished.

Bowmore, the unofficial capital of the island, was a tidy village with slate-roofed white houses and an unusual round church at the head of its broad main street. On the southern outskirts of town was some kind of sizable factory with shiny onion-shaped “pagodas” towering above its buildings. A peculiar odor filled the air, and when Dee asked what it was, Masha replied crisply. “Burning peat, fermenting barley water … and fine single-malt Scotch. We are going to tour one of the places where Islay whisky is made, because liquor from this small island is famed throughout the entire Galaxy.”

At first Dee enjoyed the Bowmore Distillery tour very much. The pagodas turned out to be ventilators on top of peat-fired kilns for roasting malted barley. In another building they watched the sweet-smelling dried malt ground up and turned into porridge. Sugary liquid drained off the porridge was mixed with yeast, and fermentation eventually turned the sugar water to a kind of barley beer having a low percentage of alcohol. This was carefully heated to concentrate the spirits through distillation.

Dee was especially intrigued by the stillroom with its huge copper vessels shaped like gnome hats. Numbers of other trippers were staring at the stills as well. The things were very old, and the tour guide began an elaborate explanation of how they operated … but suddenly Dee could no longer hear him.

It was back.

The threat of impending danger had abruptly returned. Even worse, Dee felt something prying at her mind, something cold and horrid and fearfully powerful, quite different from any human coercive-redactive prober she had ever encountered. She froze where she stood, unable to call out to Mummie or the other grownups who stood several meters away listening to the guide. There was only her brother close by, and four or five innocent-looking strangers.

Then she saw them.

They were lurking amongst a group of human beings who had just entered the stillroom: the three Gi from the ferryboat! In a flash she understood everything. Her fear turned to hot anger and indignation. She gave a mighty mental push, banishing the would-be intruder from her head, then poked her brother and whispered, “Kenny, look! Those awful Big Birds are here.”

“So what?” he muttered. He had been unusually quiet ever since they had left Dun Bhorairaig.

“They’re trying to probe my mind and they’re making me feel all spooky. I think they were sneaking about on the dun, too! If they keep following me, the holiday will be spoiled.”

“Why should the Gi follow you? You’re bonkoid! What’s the matter—are you afraid they’ll tell Mummie about your new power?”

Dee shook her head. “It’s not that at all. I’ve felt that something bad was going to happen ever since we got to Islay. And just now somebody really, really strong was trying to dig into my mind! It’s not one of the True People. It felt different. So it must be an exotic—”