Diamond Mask

by Julian May

  We went to the desk to complete the transaction, followed by Marcel, who still hadn’t abandoned hope. Her credit card had been issued by the Bank of Caledonia.

  “You’re a long way from home,” I remarked. “How do you like the Old World?”

  “I lived here from the time I was a baby until I was five,” she said, after a brief pause to sweep my mental vestibulum for traces of senile overfamiliarity. As usual when I was tending the shop, I hadn’t even bothered to put my screen up and I was readily classified as a harmless old coot with no motive other than commercial bonhomie for questioning her.

  “But I hardly remember anything about my early life on Earth,” she went on. “Our home was in Edinburgh, Scotland. It’s very different in North America. Especially … here.”

  “And a far cry from Caledonia, I betcha.”

  She eyed me in silence for a moment. Then: “You know who I am, don’t you.” It was a flat statement.

  I nodded, handing back her card, and indicated a boxlike gadget I had recently acquired for the business. “Would you like some free instant gift wrap? This machine here can do anything from ecosensitive to high camp.”

  For the first time, the corners of her lips turned up in a hint of mischief. “Can you make it really weird?”

  I put the book inside the dojigger, selected the BAD TASTE—MILD option, and hit the pad. A few moments later the finished present plopped out: screaming orange paper imprinted with motifs from Bambi Meets Godzilla, all tied up with a glittering cerise ribbon. Dorothée was delighted.

  Outside, the sky had started to spit snow pellets, those horrible little white bits like micro-popcorn that sting the face so badly when the wind is strong. I asked the girl if she would like to wait in the shop for a while and have a cup of cocoa by the fire until the nasty stuff either stopped or turned into honest snow.

  Again I felt the brief touch of her prudent mental scrutiny, affirming that I was only a Kindly Geezer rather than a Dirty Old Man. She accepted my invitation—and at that point our long friendship began.

  Marcel, purring like an outboard motor, sat happily on her lap as we chatted, and by the time she left, nearly an hour later, I had learned a fair amount about her background and she had cleverly extracted from me information about the Remillard family that I was not accustomed to share with casual acquaintances.

  In the three years that followed, Dorothée came to The Eloquent Page every other week or so. At first she feigned an interest in my wares, but finally she admitted that she just liked to talk to me. She needed an adult operant with no axe to grind as a confidant, and none of the personnel at the Preceptorial Institute filled the bill. Neither did her grandmother Masha, who had taken a Visiting Professorship at Dartmouth’s Department of Metapsychology in order to remain close to the girl and her brother. The professor and her husband, the subversive comic novelist Kyle Macdonald—my ancient drinking buddy, as you may recall—had made a nice home for the children in a rented house on the south side of Hanover. But neither Masha nor Kyle were types who invited childish trust. I apparently am, as any attentive reader of these memoirs may have deduced, and it has got me into a peck of trouble for my pains.

  But what the hell.

  At that time in my life things were tranquil enough. The bookshop was almost profitable, I was having a protracted no-strings affair with a delicious sloe-eyed librarian named Surya Gupta who worked at the Public Database around the corner, and the Remillard family members were engrossed in their own arcane machinations and not in need of a cantankerous but sympathetic father figure. Little Dorothée was.

  So I got to hear blow-by-blow accounts of her painful progress from suboperant to adept metapsychic, and from masterclass operant to Grand Master Farsensor, Creator, Coercer, Redactor, and Psychokinetic. The ultimate accolade of paramount status waited in the wings, dependent upon her rooting out the last of the inhibiting dross in her unconscious and activating the full potential of her mind. Besides lending a sympathetic ear to stories of her travails at the Institute, I made sure she learned the civilized behavior patterns and important bits of “metiquette” that kids raised in operant homes take for granted.

  Dorothée was Cat Remillard’s star pupil, and at the same time she acquired an education in our local ivy-clad halls of academe, majoring in higher mathematics and theoretical physics. Her hobbies were birdwatching (of which more anon), skiing, and hiking. She also enjoyed sewing her own clothes and creating jewelry, grinding the gemstones and doing the metalwork, too. Her favorite piece was a reproduction, in white gold and the relatively inexpensive diamonds of Caledonia, sent to her by her father, of a piece of costume jewelry she had cherished as a young child. She wore the small diamond-studded domino mask on a thin chain around her neck as a good-luck charm.

  Dorothée sometimes came to the bookshop with her brother, a pleasantly nerdish youth two years her senior, who was also in training at the Preceptorial Institute. I let Ken Macdonald use my database to hunt inexpensive collectible fantasy books in return for his doing chores such as packing mail orders and cleaning up the cat latrine. (I was never able to train this particular Marcel to use modern kitty sanitary facilities. He demanded, and got, a sandbox.) Ken had chosen to major in metapsychology. It bothered him not a whit that his mindpowers weren’t as phenomenal as those of his baby sister.

  My peaceful interlude as mentor to a saint in the making came to a crashing end in October of 2072.

  Dorothée was fifteen years old by then and just finishing her postgraduate work. She had matured physically into a young woman of small stature, and was still too shy and preoccupied with her studies to be much interested in boys. Her manner was restrained—even enigmatic—but she had already developed the personal attribute that normals call “presence.” No one would ever have mistaken her for an ordinary operant girl.

  Like other powerful metas, Dorothée routinely suppressed her aura; but there was still a palpable air of specialness about her that she was unable to disguise—even though she tried. It was by no means the “odor of sanctity” that her legend imputes to her. Neither did she have Marc’s daunting charisma nor Jack’s fey and quasi-mystical aspect. The closest I can come to describing the quality she projected is … steadfastness. Behind that little face, nearly expressionless for much of the time, was a person bound and determined to pursue her own Grail in spite of any obstacles the world or her own mind or body put in the way.

  Now that her metafaculties were confirmed to be grandmasterclass or above, it was expected that she would be nominated to the Concilium when she reached adulthood at sixteen, just as Jack had been. She was not looking forward to magnateship and the public revelation of her mental talents. Her near-paramount status had been kept quiet, and most of the operant students and faculty at Dartmouth knew nothing about it; but the fact of having all five of the higher mindpowers in the top category would be enough to make her a galactic celebrity. “High Five” metapsychics were rather common amongst the Krondaku (and the Lylmik, of course), but the other races boasted only a handful of them. Humanity, at that time, only had eleven (not including the two paramounts) that had been verified by MPC testing. The only adults in the group were Paul and Anne Remillard, Davy MacGregor, Cordelia Warshaw (née Warszawska), who was the Intendant General of Earth, and Edward Hua-Kuo Chung, the Commander-in-Chief of the Fourteenth Fleet.

  I had been aware for some time that Dorothée had a mysterious antipathy toward Jack, which he admitted was “his own fault” but declined to elaborate on further. She had continually refused to meet him face to face and he had not forced himself upon her. I never suspected that Dorothée’s soul-struggles actually involved any person other than herself and the imaginary demons each one of us must confront, nor had the thought ever crossed my mind that she had been less than honest with me.

  Then I made a very unpleasant discovery.

  I had gone down to Concord, the Polity capital, to visit Severin Remillard in his spiffy new townhouse. I’d
known Sevvie from the time he was a scrappy infant rebelling against the pacifistic philosophy espoused by his parents and most of the other pre-Intervention operants. I’d stood by him through the breakup of three marriages (one his own fault, the other two not), and surreptitiously encouraged him to follow his conscience and his younger brother Adrien and join the Rebel faction of magnates. Like me, Sevvie had a happy-go-lucky streak that went against the High Seriousness considered appropriate in the most exalted operant circles. He hip-hopped from one Concilium Directorate to another without ever seeming to find a committee with work he genuinely cared about, which drove his brother Paul and his straitlaced sister Anne to distraction. A tall, fair-haired, rather cynical individual, he was actually happiest plotting with his anti-Unity cohorts. It was inevitable that he would stand at the forefront of the Metapsychic Rebellion in 2083.

  Since Sevvie was the least priggish of the family stalwarts and a sometime professional redactor and neurosurgeon, I had gone on this occasion to seek his help in a delicate problem peculiar to the masculine gender. My adorable young librarian, Surya, had tried to be patient and understanding with me, but I had disappointed her far too often of late, and I feared that if I didn’t find some way to stiffen my resolve, she would seek a more talented bed companion.

  To his credit, Sevvie didn’t laugh when I told him my predicament. We sat together on his balcony overlooking the autumn colors of the Merrimack Valley, he considering treatment options and I observing morosely that it was a long, long while from May to December, and my days weren’t the only thing growing short as I reached September.

  “Well, you are a hundred and twenty-seven years old, Uncle Rogi,” Severin observed.

  “And you’re sixty-nine and I’m as immortal as you are, dammit! I feel just fine otherwise and I haven’t even been overindulging all that much. But my libido’s sagging like a tired soufflé.”

  “You could try some poppers. Caledonian Sunrise would tumefy an Egyptian mummy.”

  “I don’t like those things,” I grumped. “Might as well be goosed by a moose. Can’t you redact whatever’s wrong? It’s gotta be all in my mind. Maybe I’m just tired of the lady and don’t want to admit it.”

  Severin sighed and rose from his wicker chair. “Come inside then, and let me rummage around inside your brain-pan. Maybe you’re suffering from a mild depression.”

  I shuffled in after him and arranged myself on a white leather sofa strewn with black petit-point pillows. He pulled up a matching leather pouf, ordered me to close my eyes, and put his hand on my forehead. My lights went out.

  When I came to, my grandnephew was pacing the floor with a fierce scowl on his face. My groin ached dully. I elbowed myself up and bleated, “What’s wrong? Is it prostate cancer?”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” he snapped. “You’re healthy as a horse.” He helped me to my feet. “And hung like one, too. I fixed what was wrong. You’ll stop hurting in a minute. Your block and tackle went into action mode in anticipation after the redact job. I had to put the brakes on a bit crudely.”

  Oh, joy! I was a man again! I limped after Severin to the well-appointed wet bar behind his gilded grand piano. “What was the matter with me?”

  He poured a double shot of Wild Turkey and handed it over. “Uncle Rogi, somebody has systematically subjected you to a very subtle type of powerful coercive-redactive probing. Apparently, it’s been going on over a period of two years or more. The reaming was probably imperceptible to you while it was being done, but it had adverse and cumulative side effects on the hypothalamus and limbic septum, which I’ve repaired. Your love life is now back on the rails … but I suggest that you review the Grand Master Coercer-Redactors of your acquaintance and find out which one is the likeliest to have tossed your cerebrum.”

  I choked on my booze. “No!” I cried. “She couldn’t have!”

  Severin shrugged. Fortunately, I had not attached my words to a legible mental image. “Get another girlfriend,” he advised. “One who’s too weak in coercion to slip into your mind when your bells are chiming. God knows your mind-screen’s strong enough to repel all boarders when you’re not shtonkered or orgasmic.”

  “Merde,” I groaned. “Merde et contremerde!” And then I had sense enough to keep my mouth zipped and my mind shut tight. Sex and drinking had nothing to do with my violation. There was only one person aside from my great-grandnephew Ti-Jean who could have perpetrated a ream-job without a trace, and only one who would have had the opportunity, the talent, and the blatant chutzpah to do it in a public place, in the course of a casual conversation:

  Little Dorothea Macdonald.

  I was going to have to confront her with what she had done, even though it might mean the end of our friendship.

  I have mentioned that Dorothée, like myself, was an enthusiastic birdwatcher. Both of us belonged to the local branch of the Audubon Society, met frequently at its meetings and outings, and tipped each other off when a rara avis blew into town. On a certain lovely Sunday in mid-October we made a date to go down to the evergreen woodland bordering the Connecticut River after 11:30 Mass. I told her about an uncommon pileated woodpecker that had been reported lurking among the towering white pines, and we planned to photograph it.

  We sat on rocks beside the river, eating the Jarlsberg sandwiches and molasses cookies she had brought and drinking my contribution, winesap apple cider. Serious peckerwood hunting was supposed to commence after lunch.

  I got down to the real business at hand right off the bat.

  “Dorothée, I’ve learned something that disturbs me very much. Some person, a very powerful coercer-redactor, has been probing my mind without my consent. I think that person is you.”

  “Me?” she exclaimed, all indignant. “Me, prying into your mind? What in the world gave you that idea?”

  “Don’t try that reverse-question gimmick on me, kiddo,” I retorted, looking sad and betrayed. “And spare me the hurt feelings act, too. It’s taken me long enough to discover what you were doing—but then I never was accused of being the sharpest thorn on the family rosebush. You’ve been grubbing around my brain almost from the first day we met, haven’t you.”

  She looked away toward the river. “Yes. It was necessary that I obtain the life-history and detailed psychosocial profile of you and every one of the older Remillard family members, plus Marc and his siblings. The information I got was incomplete, but it sufficed for my purposes. I probed you the most extensively because you’ve lived so long and made so many objective judgments about members of the family. But I also probed all of the others except Marc and Jack, who stayed out of reach.”

  Whatever excuse I had expected for the reaming, this wasn’t it. “For God’s sake, why?”

  “The Remillards are the most prominent human family in the Milieu, but very little about their private lives or mental attributes has ever been published. You know that complete metapsychic assays of operant newborns have only been mandatory for the past fourteen years. For individuals born before 2068, the complete assay is only optional. Since the procedure is likely to be painful for an adult, few older operants have submitted to it—and that includes all of the Remillards except Paul and Anne. I needed the information for a very important research project.”

  “You reamed the lot of us for research? C’est drôlement couillon!” I scoffed.

  She had no trouble at all deciphering my meaning, which roughly equates to “bovine fecal matter,” and her little face flushed with chagrin.

  “I’m telling the truth,” she insisted. “My—my research project is private, but it’s consequential. You may verify my statement coercively if you wish.”

  “I’m no good at reaming, and you know it.” But I was capable of erecting and maintaining a cosmic-class mental barricade if my life depended upon it, and I had an uncanny feeling that it just might. Now that I was forewarned, Dorothée would never again probe me with impunity.

  “You’ve been using me, young lady,” I c
ontinued, “and that’s tacky behavior from someone I thought was my friend. Your excavating had side effects, too—knocked some of my mental machinery out of whack. I had to be redacted, for God’s sake, and that’s how I discovered what you’d been doing.”

  “I’m sorry you were hurt, Uncle Rogi. Truly I am! I had no idea the probing would do you any harm.” Her distress and contrition were genuine, all right. But then she had to spoil the effect by adding, “I did it for a very good reason, though.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” I said sternly. “I want you to explain yourself right here and now … or I’ll have to tell Catherine Remillard that her school harbors an embryonic Grand Inquisitor.”

  “No!” she cried, now regarding me with real fear on her face. “Please, don’t! If you tell her, then Jack will surely hear about it. Or even Marc himself.”

  I goggled at her. “What the bloody hell do they have to do with this? Are you going to tell me what you’ve been up to, or not?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut in some monumental act of emotional self-discipline. When she looked at me again her face was not that of a misbehaving child but of an adult on a mission of capital importance.

  “You’re different from the other members of your family, Uncle Rogi. You have no … dynastic or personal ambition. No need to prove your superiority, no great cause to promulgate. You know your operant talents are insignificant and it doesn’t bother you. You accept people as they are, without trying to change them. You have a kind heart in spite of your grumpiness and you were very good to me when I came wailing and whinging to you about my painful therapy. And so I’m going to trust you with the most important secret of my life.”

  Still seated on the rock, I sketched an ironic bow at the insolent chit and said, “Plût au ciel qu’il en fût ainsi!” Which is more or less the equivalent of “Thanks all to hell for the dubious honor.”