Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy)

by Julian May

  Whatever you say. Only … pleaseplease don’t ever leave me completely alone again.

 

  Goodbye Fury. Goodbye …

  FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

  I WAS THERE WHEN DEATH GAVE LIFE TO THEM, BOTH FURY AND THE creature called the Hydra. It happened on Good Friday in the year 2040 in the little town of Berlin, New Hampshire, on the day that Victor Remillard finally died.

  It had been the custom of my nephew Denis, Victor’s older brother, to assemble the immediate family each year on that date, ostensibly to pray for Vic’s recovery and for the salvation of his soul. I had never participated in the annual ritual before, judging it to be futile and possibly even dangerous; but that year Denis’s wife Lucille was unavailable and so I was dragooned to complete the metapsychic minyan.

  There were fifteen of us gathered around the bed of the criminal genius who had unwittingly helped to precipitate the Intervention. After he had tried and failed to murder me and nearly three thousand of Earth’s leading operants, he had been struck down—perhaps by me, perhaps by the entity I call the Family Ghost—and lapsed into a mysterious coma that deprived him of all sensory input and of all his metafaculties except self-awareness. His body, having the Remillard self-rejuvenating gene complex, had remained healthy for nearly twenty-seven years while he endured the ultimate solitary confinement. But finally, at long last, Victor seemed to be sinking toward natural death.

  Present for that last Good Friday prayer session were all seven of Denis and Lucille’s adult grandmasterclass children together with their operant spouses—the so-called Remillard Dynasty. The oldest was Philip Remillard, with his wife Aurelie Dalembert. She was the only wife who was not pregnant at the time. The other Remillards were Maurice, with his wife Cecilia Ashe; Severin, with his wife Maeve O’Neill; Anne Remillard, who was unmarried, although she did not become a Jesuit until some years later; Catherine Remillard (enceinte), with her husband Brett McAllister; Adrien, with his wife Cheri LosierDrake; and the most brilliant of the lot, Paul Remillard, with his wife Teresa Kendall.

  When Denis attempted to link me into the metaconcerted “prayer,” I balked. Frankly, I was scared shitless, wanting to have nothing whatsoever to do with Vic, who was the most evil man I have ever known. Pray for him? Maybe if I was shamed into it I might have squandered a two-bob candle in some nice, bright church, on the off chance that Jesus knew something about Vic that the rest of the world did not and was willing to forgive and forget. But in no way was I going to be involved in any interactive mental shenanigans concerning that thoroughgoing bastard. My charity does not easily embrace a man who had attempted to turn me into his zomboid stooge—and when that failed, who was ready to drain my lifeforce like a bottle of Heineken.

  So when Denis tried to incorporate me into his metaconcert I slithered out. And since I was his foster father, with all of the operant parent’s usual metapsychic perks, not even his paramount coercion could force me to stay. Thus it was that my mentality stood aside somehow, unable to perceive what transpired among Victor and the others, and I became aware that an entirely new actor had come onstage.

  Who are you? I asked.

  I am Fury.

  Where did you come from?

  I am newborn. Inevitably.

  What do you want?

  All of you. I require assistance. And I’ll take you to start with. Silly, flawed old Rogi! But you’ll be useful …

  I knew in a lightning stroke of insight that it was a demon, a mind-devourer conjured somehow by the dying Victor. It didn’t get me because the Family Ghost saved my pathetic ass, telling Fury to do what it had to do, but not with me. In the dream, or vision, or whatever the hell it was, I clung to a gigantic simulacrum of the key-ring charm that I call the Great Carbuncle and was towed back to reality.

  Where I discovered that Victor was dead.

  The Dynasty and Denis and I were all safe, and so was baby Marc, Paul’s son, who had been left in an adjacent room with a nurse.

  Victor’s body was cremated, and on Easter Monday of the year 2040 Denis went to Anticosti Starport and handed a leaden box containing the compacted ashes to the captain of the CSS Saul Minionman, outward bound to the planet Assawompsett. Before the starship left our solar system, the captain launched the remains of Victor Remillard on an impact trajectory into the sun.

  That seemed to be that … until Fury’s creature, the Hydra, fed for the first time in 2051, and it seemed that Vic had somehow been reborn.

  Brett Doyle McAllister, Catherine Remillard’s husband, was Hydra’s first victim. His body was hideously charred, and along the spine and on the head were seven peculiar ashen patches like intricately drawn wheels or flowers: chakra symbols. In Kundalini Yoga the chakras are subtle force-centers that are intimately connected to the vital lattices infusing the human body. But what had been done to Brett had no basis in pranic healing or any other ancient discipline; it was instead a kind of metapsychic vampirism that only one person was ever known to have used before.

  Victor.

  In 2013 I was an eyewitness when he murdered Shannon O’Connor, whose body was branded like Brett’s. Hours later, Shannon’s villainous father, Kieran O’Connor, was killed in an identical manner when he tried to foil Vic’s plans on the night of the Great Intervention. Only a handful of people, all nonoperant save for Denis and me, ever realized that Vic had killed O’Connor and his daughter in a completely unique manner, by draining their lifeforce through the chakra points.

  When Brett McAllister was murdered in the same way, Victor had been dead for eleven years.

  Hydra, Fury’s agent, was to remain nameless for some time to come; but the next action that could be directly attributed to Brett McAllister’s killer was an attempt on the life of Margaret Strayhorn, the wife of the famous metapsychic scholar and politician Davy MacGregor. She was attacked later that same year, 2051, while attending a dinner party at the home of Dartmouth College’s president, Tom Spotted Owl. Margaret survived the assault, but a single distinctive chakra burn on top of her head linked her assailant to that of Brett.

  Two months later, Margaret Strayhorn disappeared from her apartment in Concilium Orb, the administrative center of the Galactic Milieu, apparently a suicide. There was only a single clue that hinted at murder: her farspoken cry, Five, which her husband perceived at the moment of her death. Davy MacGregor was convinced that whoever had attacked Margaret before had finally managed to kill her and destroy her body completely.

  On the face of it, there was no obvious motive for either murder. However, Brett McAllister had managed to convince his wife Catherine Remillard to turn down her nomination to the Galactic Concilium shortly before he was slain, and the family had been extremely disappointed. With Brett dead, Cat decided to accept. This, together with certain other suspicious circumstances, led the Magistratum to conjecture that a criminally ambitious Remillard might have murdered Cat’s husband.

  The entire Dynasty, plus thirteen-year-old Marc, underwent rigorous mental probing by a Krondaku-Simbiari forensic team. The family all seemed to be exonerated; but the exotic officials had already begun to suspect that the seven adult Remillard siblings and Marc—and perhaps other powerful human metas as well—were able to screen their innermost thoughts from the usual kinds of coercive-redactive interrogation used by the Magistratum, thereby avoiding self-incrimination.

  At that time, the Human Polity was still under probation and had not yet been admitted to full citizenship in the Galactic Milieu. The suspicion that Earthlings might be able to circumvent the justice system of the Milieu—plus the possibility that our planet’s most famous and powerful metapsychic family might harbor a mental Dracula—was enough to cause some of the exotic Concilium members to demand that the Great Intervention be nullified and all humanity quarantined forthwith, with
interstellar travel permanently prohibited.

  There had been serious opposition to letting us join the Milieu in the first place. We Earthlings were considered to be a mentally immature and barbaric lot, and only a summary veto by the almighty Lylmik Supervisors had prevented our world from being passed by. The Fury-Hydra hullabaloo brought the old objections to the fore once again, and once again the Lylmik saved our bacon. They insisted that the induction of humanity into the Milieu proceed as scheduled. Furthermore, no action was to be taken against any Remillard unless there was ironclad proof of criminal activity.

  One possible motive for Margaret Strayhorn’s murder, even more tenuous than that advanced for Brett’s, also seemed to point the finger at the Dynasty. Margaret’s husband Davy MacGregor was the only serious opponent to Paul Remillard in the election contest for First Magnate of the Human Polity. A widower who had taken thirty years to recover from his first bereavement, Davy had recently discovered that his dearly loved second wife was carrying their child. Her death might have been expected to cause Davy’s emotional breakdown and the withdrawal of his candidacy, leaving the field wide open for Paul. Instead, Davy held up adamantly after Margaret’s murder and vowed to track down her killer.

  MacGregor narrowly lost the election and Paul became First Magnate; but Davy was appointed Planetary Dirigent of Earth, and took advantage of his august position to reopen the stalled investigation of the Dynasty. He acquired a fair amount of damning evidence by coercing me six ways to Sunday.

  I was forced to tell him about my first encounter in 2040 with the monster called Fury. I told him how the same malignant entity seemed to show up at the birth of Jon Remillard in 2052, apparently hoping to devour the prodigious newborn mind before being thwarted somehow by me.

  I told him how five other metas—including Adrien Remillard’s oldest daughter Adrienne—had mysteriously disappeared during that same summer in the immediate vicinity of the family beach house on the Atlantic coast. The girl’s death and the presence of seven chakras on her incinerated body had actually been perceived metapsychically by baby Jack as the murder was committed. The naïve infant, not realizing what he had witnessed, described Addie’s assailants to his brother Marc as “a Hydra” controlled by “Fury.” Ti-Jean was otherwise unable to identify the perpetrators and poor Addie’s remains were never found.

  Paul Remillard now deduced that Margaret Strayhorn’s dying thought, Five, referred to the number of minds that had combined in pernicious metaconcert to form Hydra; but it seemed quite incredible that five members of the Dynasty—six, if you counted Fury—were killers somehow possessed by Victor’s demoniac passion.

  Paul was torn between his innate desire to see justice done and his fear that the Human Polity might be expelled from the Galactic Milieu because members of his family, the most powerful human minds in the galaxy, were possibly criminal lunatics. I confessed to Davy MacGregor how Paul finally allowed Addie’s death to be attributed to sharks, as the four earlier disappearances of operants had been. There was no corroborating proof, after all, that little Jack’s appalling vision had been anything except infantile fantasy, no proof that entities called Fury and Hydra existed at all.

  Nevertheless, in his heart Paul remained convinced that Fury and Hydra were real—and somehow intimately connected to the Dynasty.

  My evidence, even though given under duress, supplied Dirigent MacGregor with legal grounds for a new interrogation of the Remillards, this time utilizing the recently invented Cambridge mechanical mind-probe, a horrendous piece of equipment that the Spanish Inquisition would have awarded five stars in the agony category. It was supposed to reveal the infallible truth when yes-or-no questions were posed to the examinees. The Dynasty and their spouses, Denis, his wife Lucille, and young Marc were all hooked to the machine and asked the following questions:

  Are you the entity called Fury?

  Do you know who or what Fury is?

  Are you the entity called Hydra, or a part of that entity?

  Do you know who Hydra is?

  Do you know who or what killed Brett McAllister?

  Do you know who or what killed Margaret Strayhorn?

  Do you know who or what killed Adrienne Remillard?

  Do you know who or what killed the four operants who disappeared in the vicinity of the New Hampshire sea-coast last summer?

  Do you know for a fact that Victor Remillard is alive?

  Do you suspect that the Fury-Hydra murders of McAllister, Strayhorn, Adrienne Remillard, and the others have some connection to the Remillard family?

  Everyone answered “No” to the first nine questions and the machine affirmed that they told the truth. All of the Dynasty wives answered “No” to the tenth question and told the truth. Lucille Cartier said “No” to the tenth question and lied. Denis Remillard, his seven adult children, and young Marc answered “Yes” to the tenth question and told the truth.

  Davy MacGregor asked the Lylmik Supervisors to rule upon whether or not the results of the questioning gave him grounds to continue his investigation of the Dynasty. The Lylmik decreed that they did not. Because the interrogation had been done confidentially, according to the discretion of the Dirigent, no record of it was released to the media or the Human Magistratum. The Galactic Magistratum in Orb did retain a file, however, and the fact of Fury and Hydra’s existence soon became the worst-kept secret among influential metas of the Human Polity—including the then-clandestine group of Magnates of the Concilium and other respected operants who would form the nucleus of the Metapsychic Rebellion in 2084.

  The Rebels were the first to speculate that Fury, controller of the Hydra assassin, might be a Remillard suffering from a malignant multiple-personality disorder, possibly triggered by some deathbed mental contact with the evil Victor. His or her “normal” persona would have no inkling that a deviant Fury aspect also existed, and this meant that Fury could never be exposed by any conventional form of mental interrogation. Only a probing of the deep unconscious—a tricky and often inconclusive procedure where Grand Master metapsychics were concerned—might manage to ferret the monster out.

  No one expected the Remillards to volunteer for further mental examination very soon.

  The next assault by Hydra was not prompted by Fury at all, but by the jealousy of the creature itself. Earlier, Hydra had suspected that Fury was seeking ways to incorporate the powerful mind of young Marc Remillard into its mysterious grand scheme. Hydra sought to prevent being overshadowed by trying to destroy Marc, in defiance of Fury’s orders. Hydra botched the job, but it was ready to try again in 2054, when Marc had just turned sixteen. Once again Marc survived … but this time one unit of Hydra’s multiplex mind died. Fury was in a towering rage at its creature’s stupidity and had to initiate drastic damage control.

  Events now rushed to a climax. At first only Marc, Ti-Jean, and I knew why Gordon McAllister, the fourteen-year-old son of Catherine Remillard and her late husband Brett, had tried to murder his cousin Marc. But the boys and I mistakenly believed that Gordon alone was Hydra.

  Fury decided that we three had to die, so that the surviving Hydra-units and the monster itself would not be exposed. I was to be eliminated first. But I was saved in spite of myself, discovering in the process that the other heads of Hydra included four other children: Celine Remillard, daughter of Maurice; Quentin Remillard, son of Severin; Parnell Remillard, son of Adrien; and Madeleine Remillard, daughter of Paul, and Marc’s own younger sister. They were all fourteen years old. Later we deduced that the Hydra-children had been in utero as their mothers prayed around the deathbed of Victor in the year 2040. Somehow, as the family’s most flagrant black sheep expired, he had been able to tempt those intelligent, precocious fetuses—and win them for his successor, Fury.

  Escaping from Hydra’s attack with a little help from a friend, I rushed to help Marc save baby Jack, who was confined to the Dartmouth Medical School’s Hitchcock Hospital with (as we then believed) terminal cancer. But Fury
got there ahead of us and set Ti-Jean’s room on fire. The miracle of the child’s rescue was described in the previous volume of my memoirs.

  The four youngsters who comprised the Hydra had disappeared, but by their brazen attack on me, they had given themselves away as homicidal cat’s-paws. The Dirigent of Earth and the Galactic Magistratum conducted intensive investigations after the Hydra-children’s identities were discovered, hoping to unmask Fury. Because the Lylmik insisted upon keeping the reputations of the Remillard magnates unsullied until indisputable proof of criminal activity was obtained, everything was handled with exquisite discretion. As far as the media were concerned, the attack on Marc by Gordon McAllister was an act of adolescent insanity, and the fire in Jack’s hospital room was an unfortunate accident that had a gloriously happy ending.

  But behind closed doors, all of us Remillards—including me, but not the newly reincarnated Ti-Jean, who was too young to endure the trauma—were subjected to interrogation conducted by the Milieu’s premier mind-reamer, Evaluator Throma’eloo Lek. By coincidence, this official had also put Marc to the question back in the days when the boy was suspected of having drowned me and his mother.

  No fresh data were obtained as a result of the Evaluator’s best efforts. We all checked out innocent as lambs. The Hydra-children had apparently vanished off the face of the Earth—and there was no trace of them on any other Milieu world, either. This meant that they were dead … or that by some unimaginable virtuoso maneuver Fury had managed to alter the mental signature—the unique brain-pattern that is registered at the birth of each operant child—of its four young minions. Backtracking, the investigators learned that the Hydra-units had indeed been in the vicinity of each chakra murder and attempted murder. But no adult Remillard could be similarly placed at every single crime scene, so none could be pinned positively with the Fury label. This did not prove their innocence, however. Not if the monster really was a family member with a split personality.