Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (11 page)

“Yes.”

“What—what d’ye say, then?”

“After examining your mind redactively, I regret that I can find no reason to commute the sentence passed upon you.”

“But I swear I wadna do it again! I swear!”

The Dirigent only said, “But you would.”

“Geordie!” Emma Ross wailed, and burst into hopeless tears.

“Belt up, you silly cearcag!”

“Haud yer wheesht, mon!” Niall Abercrombie admonished the prisoner sternly.

Geordie deflated. He threw a disgusted look at Emma. “Och, can’t we just get on with it?”

“If you wish,” the Dirigent said, “my assistant will escort your wife outside before you make your choice of sentence.”

“Aye, take her away.” Geordie seemed impassive now, staring at the floor while Niall led the distraught woman out the door.

The Dirigent took a reader-plaque from her desk and handed it to the prisoner, speaking formally. “George William Doig, since you have been adjudged by a jury of your peers counterproductive to the ultimate harmony of the Galactic Milieu, you are offered the three options inscribed on the sentencing plaque you hold. One: permanent incarceration in the Caledonian Correctional Institution on Caithness Subcontinent. Two: psychosurgical implant of a docilization unit and release to the custody of your wife, Emma Ross. Three: euthanasia … Please make your choice now by touching one of the numerals firmly with your index finger.”

“This implant,” Geordie said. “It’s the same as yon headset thing they clamped on before they brought me here?”

“Not quite. You would have a smaller device placed permanently within the limbic system of your brain. Its effects would be the same as those you experienced with the temporary docilator. You would feel easygoing and peaceful, without any inclination to perform independent actions. You would obey any legitimate command given to you without question. You would be capable of coherent speech, but it would be slow and labored.”

“I’d be a bloody zombie, right? I’ve seen those poor dossie sods picking up highway litter and restocking supermarket bins.” The eyes above the diamond mask were steady. “Caledonia has only a few hundred docilates thus far. The program is still
somewhat experimental. But you should give it serious consideration. With the implant you would remain free, do useful work, live at home, and help to support your family. You would no longer pose a danger to the community because of your inability to control your anger and sexual aggression. Instead you would feel a quiet contentment. You would still be able to experience love.”

“You mean sex with my wife?”

The Dirigent shook her head. “The docilator modifies the brain’s hormonal output, making erection and orgasm impossible, as well as suppressing other strong emotions such as anger and fear.”

Sweat had broken out on the prisoner’s brow. He stared at the options listed on the plaque. “Jesus God—some bloody choices! Turn me into a no-ball retard, lock me up for life in the chokey, or feed me to the worms!”

Dorothea Macdonald said nothing. She was standing straight now, with her arms at her sides, a shining, seemingly aloof figure.

Fiery rage welled up in Geordie Doig and he sprang from his chair. He would have flung himself at her, bludgeoned her with his big fists, torn off her fancy clothes, and fucked her senseless—

But he was paralyzed. Stiff as a plank, he overbalanced and crashed to the floor. The Dirigent’s coercion forced him to climb to his feet and stand still, trembling in every limb with impotent wrath.

“Choose,” she said.

He gave a hysterical giggle. “Oy, Diamond Mask! Is it true what they say about you? That your face is such a godawful mess it’d make a maggot puke to look at it?”

“Choose.”

“Eat shit, you rotten cunt!”

She only stared at him.

“Okay! Right, then!” He jabbed his finger at option number one. “I choose the goddam fewkin’ Devil’s Island slammer. Caithness. At least I’ll still be a man out there.”

Niall Abercrombie reopened the office door to admit the uniformed agents of the Magistratum. As they led Geordie Doig away, he cursed the Dirigent at the top of his voice, piling obscenity on obscenity until they clamped the docilator on him again.

Dorothea Macdonald went back to her desk and sat down. She took up a refreshment flask with a drinking tube and drank some water. Niall handed her a sheaf of durofilm documents and the official seal.

“A rough one, eh, lassie?”

“A rough one,” she agreed, and for a moment her artificial voice, generated by psychokinetic manipulation of air molecules, wavered. “But then, they all are.”

“That scunnersome swine! Twas all I could do not to fetch him a guid belt in the gob, hearin’ him snash ye like that.” Niall was a holdover from the administration of the late Graeme Hamilton, as invaluable as he was overfamiliar. In spite of this, and his incorrigible addiction to trite Scots dialect, the Dirigent was extremely fond of him.

She took the papers without commenting on his indignant outburst and swiftly read the first one. “I’m denying this descent-and-distribution appeal from the Cairngorm probate court. Even if the man died intestate, the inheritance rights of nonborn second-degree kin clearly supersede those of the state.” She scribbled a few words and added her initials. “When are those Cairnies going to concede that nonborns have exactly the same rights in law as biological offspring? This is the Galactic Milieu, for heaven’s sake—not nineteenth-century Aberdeen.”

“They’re a dour and conservative ilk out there in Cairngorm,” Niall observed with a shrug.

She frowned as she read the next document. “What’s this? An import quota extension request for two hundred C240 mind-interface units? What in the world are these people building that requires premium brainboards like that? Who owns this company—this Muckle Skerry Bionics—anyway? I’ve never heard of them.”

“I can find oot. Could be they’re some adult amusement outfit with a hot new line in expensive erotic perjinkities.”

She set the document aside. “With boards like this in their tickle-suits, the customers would risk gonad meltdown … Have an ODC interstellar commerce agent go to Beinn Bhiorach and do a quiet investigation. This is the second shipment of sophisticated glom components somebody’s tried to import ex-quota within the past three months. It may be perfectly innocent. But I’ve heard a rumor about offensive metacreative CE equipment—mental lasers—being built on Satsuma. I want to be certain it’s not happening here.”

Niall nodded. “Will do, and I’ll bid our lad gang warily. By the bye, there was a subspace call from Director Jon Remillard, came in whilst ye were dealing with sweet Geordie. He’ll be giving ye a farshout in ten minutes or so.”

“I should be finished with these soon. Check with the Sergeant-at-Arms
at the Assembly, will you? See if there’s any likelihood of a vote delaying Dad.”

“Aye, that I’ll do.” Abercrombie left the room, closing the door.

All of the other documents were routine, and she initialed those that were ratified and zapped them with the small laser seal. When the work was done she rose from the desk and went to look out the window at the capital city. There was a fine view of the Firth of Clyde from her office on the three-hundredth floor of the Dirigent House stratotower. Vessels crowded the waters—container ships bringing goods from the outlying small continents, tugboats hauling barges filled with grain, produce, and forest products from upriver, skim-ferries zipping between the suburban islands, smaller watercraft of every description. It was too overcast to see the Vee-ways overhead, but her ultrasenses perceived the intricate computer-controlled streams of commercial and private rhocraft moving in dozens of different vectors above New Glasgow.

For a moment she concentrated, savoring the deeper aura of Caledonia itself. It was a world having precious little dry land, with jagged mountains, strings of volcanic islands, and forests that were as bravely multicolored as the tartans of old Scotland. Its population was only just over a million, even though it was one of the earliest settled of the ethnic planets. An Earthling didn’t earn a living easily on Callie, but the stubborn colonists had persevered in their “safe haven.” The Scottish world had been both self-sufficient and prosperous until the blowout of the diatreme.

New Glasgow was heavily damaged by earthquakes and fires following the eruption, as were many other cities and towns on the populous Clyde Subcontinent. The stratotowers housing the government, the university, and the principal business offices were buttressed by inertialess fields and had gone unscathed. But the older parts of the capital, the twisting lanes and closes along the waterfront that were crowded with quaint jerry-built structures dating back over fifty years, had been hard hit. Most of the devastated areas were lower-working-class neighborhoods, long overdue for urban renewal for all that they were picturesque and evoked memories of the earliest days of Callie’s colonization.

Dorothea’s late predecessor, Dirigent Graeme Hamilton, had always had a soft spot in his heart for the rickety waterfront with its flourishing grog-shops, flea markets, resorts of dubious amusement, and ever-useful junkyards, and he’d balked at renovation. (It would also have cost a lot of money, which the colony couldn’t spare.) Now, thanks to the diatreme and a subsequent influx of no-strings Milieu disaster relief funding, New Glasgow could be
tidied up without depleting the planetary treasury or raising taxes. There’d be a difficult interim, but reconstruction was well under way. The most serious problem involved the nearly forty thousand displaced residents who had been housed by the Human Polity Red Cross in temporary towns set up in the Clyde hinterlands. Despite the government’s best efforts, most of these settlements were little more than collections of cheerless barracks, decent enough shelter from the weather but sadly lacking in privacy. There was already grumbling that the Milieu and the Old World weren’t doing enough to help the diatreme refugees, and politicians were exploiting the situation both on Caledonia and in the European Intendancy back on Earth.

Musing over her planet’s problems, the Dirigent wondered if it was really possible that criminal elements were manufacturing potentially lethal CE equipment somewhere on Callie. The Japanese ethnic world of Satsuma, located in a star system not far away, had a persistent problem with operant yakuza mobsters, but there had never been organized crime on the Scottish planet. On the other hand, Beinn Bhiorach, where the suspicious components were to be shipped, was the most remote and thinly populated of Caledonia’s continental landmasses. BB had been her own childhood home, and she knew well enough that its steep glens and abandoned mine workings were capable of concealing any number of crooked enterprises.

But a Scots mafia in embryo? What a stone daft notion!

There was a more chilling possibility—one that the lofty-minded, altruistic exotic races of the Milieu had scarcely yet begun to address. What if the illicit cerebroenergetic equipment wasn’t intended for criminals at all? What if the faction of anti-Unity humans, the so-called Rebels, were arming themselves in order to secede from the galactic confederation by force?

It was a far-fetched idea that had come into her mind out of nowhere—perhaps because of the upcoming lunch with her father, about which she was feeling qualmish—and she gave it small credence. Callie wasn’t yet a hotbed of anti-Milieu sentiment as cosmop Okanagon and some of the “planets of color” were; but its Celtic-heritage denizens were prickly and antiestablishment by nature, and hardship caused by the diatreme eruption had exacerbated the groundswell of political discontent that had long flourished among the plaidie hills.

One of the most vocal of Caledonia’s Rebel stalwarts was Ian Macdonald, Beinn Bhiorach’s sole Intendant Associate and the Dirigent’s own father …

Diamond
.

Jack!

Her troubled mood vanished as she responded to his telepathic hail. For a few minutes they shared special thoughts on the intimate mode of farspeech. Persons other than young lovers would doubtless have found their mental conversation cloying and sentimental, to say nothing of hackneyed; but to Jack and Dorothea the ideas were new and precious and important, dealing as they did with the wonder of each other.

At last, however, his mental nuances reluctantly revealed that he had another reason for bespeaking her:

There’s bad news, sweetheart. I’m on Okanagon. My Aunt Anne was involved in a serious accident here. Her starship crashed.

Oh, no! How is she?

Anne’s alive but badly hurt. Unfortunately, her three exotic companions and the human pilot died.

I’m so sorry, Jack.

The worst part is, we think the crash was no accident.

Oh, God
.
And it happened on Okanagon?

Yes. Anne and some of her associates from the Panpolity Directorate for Unity had come from Orb to confer with the Commander-in-Chief of the Twelfth Fleet, Owen Blanchard. There have been recent allegations by loyalist Magnates of the Concilium that the Twelfth is top-heavy with officers belonging to the Rebel party.

Yes, I know. And the allegations are true.

Anne and her colleagues were going to look into it. No big thing. She didn’t want to get the spacers all torqued and testy. It was to be a discreet sampling of sentiment, to find out how the anti-Unity misunderstandings that seem to be so prevalent in this Sector might be corrected. In the case of the Fleet, Anne had considered revising the curriculum at Chelan Academy, plus instituting mandatory reeducation of the commissioned officers. The Directorate discussed all this months ago.

What did Blanchard think of that idea? I’ve heard that he’s one of the top Rebel leaders. He and Annushka Gawrys were once lovers, you know. Some people say that the concept of an anti-Milieu political party originated with the two of them.

Anne never talked to Blanchard. Her courier ship went down the very morning that the first conference was scheduled. There’s no doubt that the pilot deliberately caused the disaster. He might have been a suicidal anti-Unity fanatic—but there’s another
possibility. The ship was an express courier, and the pilot was a low-ranked adept-class operant, wearing a conventional CE control helmet. The hat could have been sneetched, coercing him to fly the ship into the ground. The passengers had no inkling that anything was wrong until it was too late to do anything about it. Anne only survived because she spun a crude metacreative cocoon around herself at the last minute. It didn’t protect her completely, but it did the job. She’ll be in a regen-tank for at least a year.