Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (24 page)

Dee thought the starship was marvelous and never noticed the threadbare tartan carpeting, the scuffed and dented plass bulkheads, or the unpleasant chemical smell pervading their cramped en suite bath.

The observation lounge, when she found it, was much smaller than the one on the ferryboat to Islay and more modestly furnished. Two dozen scruffy easy chairs, all empty, faced a viewport of transparent cerametal five meters in diameter.

Outside the window was … nothing.

Dee stood transfixed at the sight of the hyperspatial matrix. It was not really gray, nor was it black or white or any other color she could name. It shone at the same time that it seemed to soak up the artificial light from the lamps in the lounge, making the place seem dim and cavelike but eerily lacking in shadows. If one stared keenly at the gray limbo it was featureless; but a sidelong glance seemed to detect minute trembling motions and larger ghostly waveforms racing in all directions. At irregular intervals the cryptic nothingness seemed racked by an enormous
throb
that overwhelmed the lesser pulsations. Hyperspace seemed to Dee to be alive, and she could not take her bedazzled eyes off it even when they began to hurt and she felt increasingly dizzy. It never occurred to her to call upon her self-redaction. She dared not look away from that bewitching window! Any moment now, something stupendous would surely happen—

“Now then, lassie. I think that’s enough.”

Someone took hold of her shoulders gently and spun her about, away from the maddening, irresistible gray.

Dee blinked and the spell was broken. She shivered, wiped
her eyes, and saw that her rescuer was a tall man wearing a black velvet jacket with silver buttons. He had on a fancy white shirt, a black bow tie, and a kilt of scarlet with a lattice of black stripes and thin lines of gold. His sporran was white leather with silver tassels, his shoes had silver buckles, and there was a small knife with a jewel in the hilt tucked into the top of his right stocking. He guided Dee to a chair near the snack bar, sat her down facing away from the viewport, and ordered the bar to produce a cup of sweet milky coffee.

“The gray limbo’s a fascinating thing,” the man said, “but it can drive a body clean daft if you keep staring at it.”

The steaming drink arrived in a thickish plass mug with no saucer or spoon. The man presented it to her with a theatrical flourish and a charming smile that lifted one side of his mouth higher than the other. His chin had an attractive cleft and he was very good-looking, with hair that was completely white and glittering eyes so deeply sunken she could not tell their color.

“My name is Ewen Cameron and I’m going to Caledonia to see some friends,” he said. “Drink this and the dizziness will go away. Experienced star-travelers know that if you want to look at the limbo, you must always make an effort to turn away every few minutes. Coerce yourself if need be.”

Dee took brief sips of the drink to be polite. She really didn’t much care for coffee and wished that the man had ordered hot chocolate. “Thank you, Citizen Cameron. I’ll remember what you said.”

“What’s your name, lass?”

She told him. The drink made her feel better almost at once. How funny, she thought. It was delicious, and now it really did taste very much like chocolate! Perhaps it was a special kind of Caledonian coffee. She drank it all and set the cup aside. Her fellow passenger had ordered coffee for himself as well, but she caught a whiff of something else in the steam wafting from his cup. He’d put brandy in it, just like Uncle Robbie did—had done—sometimes.

“Does that stuff make the coffee taste better?” she asked.

“Yes—if you’re an old man with creaky bones, brandy makes it much better.” Are you feeling all right now?

“Yes, thank you.”

Good. Now tell me: Why didn’t you take the dose of painkiller that’s provided for nonoperant children?

She giggled, still feeling slightly light-headed. “I thought I’d see if I could dodge the pain instead. And I did. It was easy.”

So you redacted yourself, did you?

“Only a little bit,” she said quickly. “A very little bit. I’m not really an operant at all.”

You mean you would like not to be one. But you’ll have to do much better than this if you want to continue hiding your powers from your grandmother. She
will
bring you back to Earth if she finds out, you know. The Milieu law regarding metapsychically talented children takes precedence over the rights of a nonoperant parent. Any adult operant who discovers that you are capable of farspeech has a legal obligation to report the fact to the authorities. So you’ll have to be very careful. Especially around strong coercers like your Gran who might try to diddle you into demonstrating your ultrasensitivity. Do you understand what I’m saying?

“Yes. I’m a child prodigy and very mature for my age. But you’re wrong about me being ultrasensitive. I—” She broke off, her eyes widening in sudden dismay, realizing what she had been doing. “No!” she moaned.

Yes. You answered me when I spoke telepathically.

She sprang to her feet. “It’s not fair! You tricked me!” She would have run away, but her feet seemed glued to the tatty carpet.

“Quite right,” he admitted, speaking aloud. “I tricked you to show you that you’re very young and very vulnerable, and without help you’ll never be able to deceive Gran Masha and stay with your father on Caledonia. You do want to stay, don’t you?”

“Yes.” Yesyes YES!

He stretched out his hand, laid it gently on top of her head, and smiled in sudden bemusement. “An angel! How apropos. Let’s delegate the job to him, shall we?”

Completely mystified, Dee was taken by surprise when a new thing bloomed within her mind. No … it was not really a thing at all: it was a
way.
A linked series of steps leading to a goal she desperately desired. Following that way, she need never fear that she would inadvertently disclose her last great secret to Gran or anyone else. The angel would help keep her mind’s mask in place and he would also stop her from making stupid mistakes—as she had just done by responding to the tall man’s farspeech.

“Did you put those things into my head?” she asked him timidly.

He placed both their empty cups into the bar’s disposal and then headed for the door leading to the corridor. “You would
have learnt to be cautious about farspeech and found the proper counteraction to coercion yourself after a while. I simply helped you along so that nothing would prevent you from staying with your father. It’s important that you live with him now.”

She stared up at the man in the kilt, overcome with wonder. “Are
you
my angel?”

He laughed. “Only this once. But you’ll have others when you need them.” He left the lounge, closing the door behind him.

Dee’s wrist-com peeped. She pressed
RECEIVE
and Gran’s voice said: “Your brother is awake now and the captain has invited all the first-class passengers for a visit to the command bridge, to show us how the ship is run. Would you like to come, too?”

“Oh, yes! I’d love to! Wait for me, Gran. I’ll be there in just a second.”

She pulled the door open and dashed out into the corridor, all memory of the man named Ewen Cameron erased from her mind.

The ship’s final exit from the hyperspatial matrix into the star system of Caledonia was a moment of magic for Dee. Poor Ken lay drugged in the stateroom and so he missed experiencing the event live, as did the other zonked-out normals aboard. But Dee and Gran and twenty or so operant passengers sat watching in the observation lounge when the ship burst out of featureless subspace for the last time.

The mesmerizing gray outside the window shattered into a blaze of turbulent color. And then a planet appeared, very large and three-quarters-lit against a backdrop of diamond-flecked black. Sparkling artificial satellites hovered about Caledonia like fireflies, and seeming to look over its shoulder was the world’s natural moon, Ré Nuadh, appearing to be shiny and flat as an oval silver medal.

“Crikey!” exclaimed one of the indentured doctors, impressed in spite of himself. “She’s a beaut.”

“As long as you don’t get tired of raindrops falling on your head,” said a female engineer. “Will you look at that cloud cover?”

“Mostly cirrus,” somebody else said in an authoritative tone. “Ice crystals, and also a fair amount of high-altitude volcanic dust. I’ve heard the surface gets hazy sunlight about half the time.”

And the other half you drown.

Most of the operants laughed. Dee was very careful not to.

She had seen pictures and Tri-Ds of Caledonia’s island-strewn surface, but none of them prepared her for the view from space. Unlike the familiar white-splashed blue marble that was Earth, the Scottish world seemed to be a gigantic misty opal mounted on its nightside crescent of black velvet. In contrast to the harsh blaze of its quartered moon, the planet was softly luminous, shadowed with pale lilac and milky aquamarine. Scattered small openings in the nearly universal cloud mantle decorated it with slashes, spirals, and ragged holes that glowed vivid azure—or, rarely, a dark brownish-green splotched with ochre.

“This is your captain speaking. We have emerged into an orbit above Caledonia and shut down our superluminal drive. In a moment we will switch to ordinary inertialess rho-field propulsion and begin the planetary approach.”

A dim web of purplish fire enveloped the window for a split second before fading to invisibility. The planet seemed to swell like a rapidly inflating balloon until it filled the entire opening with mother-of-pearl luster. Then the scene outside darkened as the ship curved around to the world’s nightside. The window showed only blackness, broken by what seemed to be hundreds of scattered small bursts of flickering fuzzy light that rapidly grew in size and intensified in brightness. The captain informed the passengers that most of these silent explosions were huge thunderstorms. Certain deep crimson pulsations, rarer than the lighter-colored ones, signified the presence of active volcanoes.

When the starship broke through the high cloud deck Dee saw the Caledonian ocean shimmering faintly in the blaze of incessant lightning from towering ranks of cumulonimbus cells. The captain told them that the storms reached nearly 21,000 meters into the sky and were so powerful that they could tear an ordinary small passenger-egg to bits. As the starship flew much more slowly above the night sea they saw their destination on the horizon, the continent of Clyde, a black jagged landmass rimmed and spangled with the lights of human habitation. Then came the oddest sight of all, when a myriad of miniature yellow and blue flashes battered the observation port like a sudden snowstorm of fireworks.

“The sparks that you see,” said the captain’s voice, “are due to a natural phenomenon unique to Caledonia. They are caused when the ship’s unshielded rho-field makes contact with aerial plant life called looyunuch anower that float in a zone around
six thousand meters above the planetary surface. We do our utmost to avoid passing through drifts of these lifeforms, since they are a special part of Caledonia’s ecology, but sometimes it’s impossible to avoid them.”

“And the space line’s too cheap to shield its old scows with sigmas that’d push the wee airplants aside,” growled a man in a tam-o’-shanter hat who sat in the seat next to Dee’s. His name was Lowrie, and he was an immigrant of the most desirable type—an operant geochemist come to work in the fast-growing fullerene processing cooperatives.

“Airplants!” Dee exclaimed. “My Daddy grows those on his farm!”

Lowrie glanced at her briefly. “Your Daddy doesn’t grow the luib-heannach an adhair, lass, he only harvests them. Skyweeds grow wild—and most of them are verra, verra wild indeed!” There was laughter from the other adults.

The ship now decelerated with startling suddenness, as though it had come up against a glass wall in mid-air, but the passengers felt no discomfort because the rho-field abolished external gravity-inertia. They floated toward a region of patterned lights, where the vessel would land softly in the sea and be towed into a dock. Caledonia’s only starport was not prosperous enough to have the huge sigma generators needed for shielded starship cradles.

“We are entering our final approach and splashdown,” the captain said. “We’ll dock at Wester Killiecrankie Starport at approximately twenty-five-thirty hours Planet Mean Time. Thank you for traveling the MacPherson Line. Safety and economy are our prime directives.”

“Come along, Dorothea,” said the professor frostily. “There’s nothing more to see and we must all get ready for decon.”

“Yes, Gran.” Dee took her grandmother’s hand and the two of them hurriedly left the lounge.

It had been very interesting, listening to the other passengers’ telepathic conversation throughout the voyage. The miners’ talk, especially, was completely unlike any that Dee had ever heard before. Ken had sometimes been rendered speechless at the things she reported overhearing.