Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy)

by Julian May

  In the end, there was nothing Davy MacGregor and the Magistratum could do but abandon the investigation. Neither Fury nor the Hydra were heard from again until eight years had passed, and even then they might have escaped notice had it not been for Evaluator Throma’eloo Lek and little Dorothea Macdonald.

  Fury had made an excellent choice when it decided to hide its creature on Islay in the Scottish Hebrides. By the mid twenty-first century the island had only about four thousand permanent inhabitants. Because of the Milieu’s social policy of compelling the best and brightest of humanity (especially those with metafaculties) to achieve their highest potential, only a handful of elderly, invalid, and intransigent metas were allowed to continue living on the remote island. Every one of these possible threats to Hydra’s security died conveniently of “natural causes” not long after the fourfold creature took up residence on Islay.

  The possibility of meta babies being born to normals remained, especially since so many of Islay’s inhabitants had Celtic genes. (This meant that an exceptionally large percentage of the population were promising latents with unlimited reproductive licenses who might be expected to engender operant offspring.) But here again Milieu law inadvertently kept the island free of operant residents who might detect the creature. Since there was no metapsychic preceptorial facility on Islay, normal parents with meta newborns were obliged either to move to the mainland in order to live near such a school or else give up their children to operant foster care. This particular aspect of the hated Reproductive Statutes remained on the books even after the Human Polity achieved full Milieu citizenship, and it served Fury’s purposes well. While thousands of meta tourists visited picturesque Islay each year, none stayed long enough to detect the anomalous aura of the Hydra.

  Details of the creature’s covert years on the island, and of the crimes perpetrated by the Hydra while it lived there, were revealed piecemeal during the intensive investigation into the deaths of Viola Strachan, Robert Strachan, and Rowan Grant. The Magistratum was able to determine from residual DNA traces and circumstantial evidence that the four Hydra fugitives had resided at Sanaigmore Farm ever since they fled New Hampshire. The young quartet officially took up residence on Islay in mid-2054, although it was probable that they had occupied the supposedly vacant farmhouse for some months before that. Sanaigmore was purchased in June of that year on behalf of the Eumenides Corporation of Elysium by one Frederick Urquhart Ramsay Young, a man of unmemorable appearance who represented himself to the local authorities as an interstellar export-import entrepreneur. That the acronymous Citizen Young was filthy rich became evident after he contracted for the extensive renovation of the isolated old farmstead, turning it into a handsome country residence with all mod cons and then some, including an independent power supply and a satellite uplink.

  The youngsters, who had assumed the names Celia and Magdala MacKendal and John and Arthur Quentin, were alleged to be two sets of nonoperant orphaned siblings with mild mental and physical disabilities. They were the wards of the abovementioned F. U. R. Young, their maternal Uncle Fred. Their caregivers included a governess-therapist named Philippa Ogilvie (also of eminently forgettable appearance) and a pair of close-mouthed locals, Rod and Judith Campbell, who functioned as live-in cook-housekeeper and man-of-all-work until their “accidental death” in a fiery groundcar wreck five years later.

  No merchant, contractor, day laborer, repair person, regional official, or other Islay citizen ever saw Uncle Fred or Ms. Ogilvie together, nor were any photos, digital likenesses, fingerprints, mindprint IDs, or genetic material of theirs ever tracked down. All known details of their background, including their names, were later found to be fictitious. Scores of witnesses claimed to have seen them and dealt with them during various business transactions, but no one could give a distinctive description of either one. It was as though they were ghosts, drab and instantly forgettable, who went abroad in daylight, performed certain mundane operations, then reentered the oblivion from which they had sprung.

  Magistratum investigators speculated that the Fury persona itself might have played both roles using “sendings,” psychocreative simulacra projected from a distant locale, when it seemed desirable to demonstrate that the four orphaned adolescents did indeed have adult protectors. From what I myself learned later about Fury’s activities, I can affirm that the monster never physically set foot on Islay; but whether Young and Ogilvie were living dupes later disposed of by Fury or only illusions is anyone’s guess.

  Frederick Young made only sporadic visits to the children and the farm after the new household settled in, since his business supposedly required him to travel to the human colonies of the Milieu. On his rare sojourns in Islay he sometimes took the four youngsters out for dinner at one of the fine hotel restaurants that catered to tourists, or went walking with them in the wild moors of the uninhabited northern parts of the island. The extended family would exchange polite greetings with any birdwatcher, botanist, or cross-country stroller they chanced to meet. Sometimes the family would walk on … and at other times, if circumstances were propitious, it evidently paused to feed.

  Now and again Uncle Fred would drop into a pub in Bowmore, sipping a dram of Islay’s finest and keeping himself to himself, except for a bit of inconsequential chitchat. No one ever suspected he was not what he appeared to be. No one seems to have thought very much about him at all—not even when suboperant island residents began to disappear and rumors of the Kilnave Fiend resurfaced after a hiatus of nearly two hundred years.

  The Ogilvie woman was even more shadowy than Young, coming into Bowmore to shop only every two weeks and declining every overture from friendly local folks eager to recruit her into political, social, or charitable groups. Any busybodies bold enough to come knocking on the door at Sanaigmore were invariably confronted by one of the surly Campbells and told that “Miss Pippa and the young people are at study” and not to be disturbed under any circumstances.

  For the first two years of their stay on Islay, the Hydra-children were schooled at home by a series of private tutors, each with impeccable credentials in a wide variety of academic disciplines. One of the farm outbuildings had been converted into an elaborately appointed schoolhouse, complete with laboratory and shop facilities. A fine gymnasium, a game room, a handball court, and a heated swimming pool had been tucked within the shell of the old barn. The educators, all nonoperant, were mostly recruited from mainland Britain and paid exorbitant salaries to compensate for their tour of duty in the lonely Hebrides. They would drive to the farm each schoolday, work with the four youngsters, then drive back to their lodgings in Bridgend or Bowmore or one of the other south-shore villages when classes were over. They rarely saw Ms. Ogilvie and almost never encountered Uncle Fred—except when they were hired or dismissed.

  The tutors never suspected that their unusual students were metapsychic operants with exceptionally powerful coercive and creative abilities. The psychologically astute did note the atmosphere of profound sexual tension that seemed to prevail among the young people, and some of the more susceptible teachers found themselves hopelessly smitten by one or another of their charges—but to no avail. The Hydra-children had no casual affairs with their teachers or with any other residents of Islay who lived to tell about it, nor did they socialize with the islanders, except in the most perfunctory way.

  When the children attained their majority at age sixteen they were legally free to dispense with home tutoring. They set about to acquire their higher education working independently at four different institutions via satellite, never leaving their island of exile.

  While the former tutors’ later testimony to the Magistratum proved virtually useless as a source of information about the mysterious governess or the children’s skittish guardian, it did provide valuable insight into the developing characters of the four Hydras themselves.

  Magdala MacKendal (a.k.a. Madeleine Remillard, the third child of Paul and Teresa and Marc’s younger sister)
was the most brilliant of the quartet, and the only one with whom I was more than casually acquainted during the pre-Islay years. (The total offspring of the Dynasty numbered forty, and at family gatherings they tended to blend into an amorphous rainbowauraed mob.) I remember Maddy as a calculating minois—a pretty little thing—who was tactfully compliant to Marc and her bossy older sister Marie, but often inconsiderate and even cruel to her brother Luc, who was a year younger and a rather shy and sickly child at that time. When baby Jack arrived, Maddy took an unusual interest in him and spent a lot of time ingratiating herself. In hindsight, she was probably attempting to bring Jack into Fury’s orbit—a futile enterprise that the monster seems to have abandoned once Ti-Jean was diagnosed as having cancer. With her ebony hair, compelling blue eyes, and pale perfect complexion, Madeleine Remillard grew up to be a stunner by any standard, and—according to one wistful jobbing pedagogue, who didn’t realize how lucky he’d been to escape with his goolies intact—she was as distant and cold as the aurora borealis, while at the same time reminding him of a barely dormant volcano. She later graduated summa cum laude from Harvard’s home-study division and earned an advanced degree in Milieu law.

  John Quentin (Quint Remillard, youngest son of Severin by his third wife Maeve O’Neill) was characterized by his teachers as an amoral charmer with blond curls and carnivorous eyes. Although not quite as talented as his first cousin Maddy, Quint easily managed degrees in psychophysics and philosophy from Cambridge’s Open University branch.

  Celia MacKendal (Celine, Maurice Remillard’s fourth child and the firstborn of Cecilia Ashe) struck all of her tutors as mentally disturbed, for all that she was wanly pretty and winsome as a porcelain figurine, with hair the color of clover honey and darting, evasive turquoise eyes. Her manner was superficially prim, almost timid, and the tutors claimed that she suffered wildly fluctuating mood swings, lapses of memory, and other evidences of mental instability. Celine had once been discovered by a scandalized science instructor naked as a jaybird in the high meadow adjacent to the farmhouse, apparently having blatantly satisfying sadomasochistic sexual congress with an invisible being. The instructor was promptly discharged, but he received a consoling bonus and kept his mouth shut until the Magistratum interview. Celine’s college work was mediocre except in metapsychology, and she got a satellite-study B.A. sheepskin from Stanford in California.

  Arthur Quentin (Parnell, son of Adrien Remillard and co-murderer of his older sister Adrienne) was apparently the low head on the Hydra totem pole. His teachers characterized him frankly as a lout, and he barely scraped a nanotech engineering degree from the Extension Division of Tiranë Polytechnic. In young manhood Parni had the tall, burly physique and dark hair of his cousin Marc; but where Marc’s body was massively elegant, Parni’s was brutish. When Dorothée showed me his memorecalled image years later, he reminded me of that classic stereotype, the raging, bearlike Canuck brawler who would duke it out with Sergeant Preston of the Mounties at the climax of the antique television show. His role in the Hydra metaconcert was mental muscle, not subtlety, and he was an insatiable gobbler of lifeforce as well as the designated reality-partner in Celine’s demented sexual romps.

  When the young Hydras were about eighteen, their governess was seen less and less frequently in town and the young people began to do the shopping and deal with all the other household affairs on their own. The two Campbells died during the following year and were not replaced. Ms. Ogilvie was said to have left to take another position shortly thereafter. Uncle Fred also made fewer and fewer appearances on Islay, and in the year 2059 a brief notice appeared in the Islay Guardian newsbase: the peripatetic businessman Frederick U. R. Young of Sanaigmore Farm and Erinys House, Elysium, had died tragically in a hotel fire on the “Russian” planet Chernozem, leaving his four wards as his only heirs.

  It was expected that the bereaved young people would sell the farmhouse and move away. But to everyone’s surprise they carried on as reclusively as ever.

  And so did the Kilnave Fiend.

  The Magistratum would eventually number the unaccounted-for victims of the Hydra on Islay at approximately twenty-nine, averaging three or four a year from the time that the Remillard children first came to the island. All ages and both sexes were sacrificed to the creature’s hunger for human vitality, and the victims shared only one characteristic in common: they were all suboperants, persons born with extremely strong but latent metafaculties. Most of them disappeared without a clue. Only in three of the earliest cases were peculiar areas of scorched earth or rock discovered, together with DNA traces and bits of burnt clothing belonging to the missing persons.

  These circumstances had prompted tales of the resurrected Kilnave Fiend. The amused Hydra decided to reinforce the legend, and from time to time island children or other susceptibly imaginative persons caught glimpses of a weird, dwarfish person lurking about in lonely places.

  The local police dismissed the Fiend sightings as tosh and taradiddle. But in spite of their best efforts at the time, the disappearances remained unsolved until the deaths of the three Edinburgh researchers brought in the full resources of the Galactic Magistratum and the First Magnate of the Human Polity.

  However, the homicide suspects were not then or ever identified publicly as Remillards. Once again the Lylmik Supervisors acted to protect the reputation of Paul and the other distinguished members of Humanity’s First Family of Metapsychics. This chronicle of mine is the first to reveal the truth.

  Professor Masha MacGregor-Gawrys underwent rigorous conventional mind-probing following the three deaths and she also freely submitted to testing with the Cambridge machine. The principal objective of the examining authorities was to determine whether there had been a significant motive for the latest killings, or whether the victims had been only casually slain by the Hydra, in the manner of the luckless Islay suboperants who had preceded them.

  Nothing in Masha’s mind indicated that the triple slaying was anything but coincidental. It was troubling to Paul Remillard that she seemed to believe that the dead researchers had been working on a CE operator safety study that was expected to show severely negative conclusions—when examination of their encrypted raw data files at Edinburgh University demonstrated that users of highly advanced cerebroenergetic equipment faced only a moderate and acceptable risk, about as much as xenoplanetologists or urban firefighters. But Masha had, after all, recently undergone rejuvenation, and six months in the regen-tank was known to induce a temporary discombobulation even in the brain of a Grand Master. The professor herself decided in time that she was probably honestly mistaken about the research results that had been discussed by the dead trio.

  Paul Remillard, however, experienced a lingering uneasiness about the subject of the Edinburgh study, although he said nothing about it to Throma’eloo Lek or the other Magistratum officials.

  Little Kenneth Macdonald was questioned with the utmost gentleness by Paul himself, but the boy knew almost nothing of value, other than confirming the fact of his sister’s proleptic anticipation of mortal danger and her uncanny knowledge that Sanaigmore Farm was the source of it.

  Dorothée was in a state of severe shock in the wake of the killings; but unlike her brother, she had not yet wept or manifested any other emotional outburst. The examiners realized that they would have to treat her with extreme caution if she was not to break down. She answered all verbal questions willingly, and even worked with a police computer artist to provide depictions of the two suspicious adults who had spoken to her on the ferry and introduced her to the story of the Kilnave Fiend. (The book-plaque they left behind was devoid of clues.) She also described her vivid dream of the murders and assisted the artist in producing likenesses of the third and fourth units of Hydra.

  Both Paul and Throma’eloo Lek were convinced that Dorothée had not dreamed about the killings at all, but rather had experienced a rare type of symbolic excorporeal excursion—an out-of-body experience—instigated by some metacoer
cive impulse of her mother or the other victims. The authorities were very eager to perform an exhaustive examination of the girl’s memories, not only to retrieve more details of the auras of Madeleine and Quentin, which would aid in the manhunt, but also to glean other possible clues to the murders that Dorothée might have forgotten or repressed.

  Paul explained very carefully to her how important it was that they probe her mind. He told her that they would give her a hypnogogic drug that would put her into a peaceful, drowsy state. She would not remember the least bit of discomfort when the procedure was over.

  “Would it be like the medicine that the latency therapists use to get inside patients’ minds?” the little girl asked Paul. When he conceded that the drug was similar, Dorothée reacted with unexpected vigor, refusing absolutely to permit the probe. No appeal from the First Magnate, the Krondak Evaluator, or her grandmother Masha could shake her decision.

  “The doctors used that medicine on me when they tried to push their way into my mind,” she said. “It hurt and it made me terribly sick.”

  “But this is a different medicine.” Paul tried to soothe her. “I promise that it won’t be painful.”

  “No!” The small face was adamant. “I told you everything I know.” Then, displaying an amazing dignity for one so young, she asserted that her mind was her own and she would allow no outsider to enter … “except the angel.”

  This amazing qualification to her refusal precipitated a considerable fuss. Evaluator Throma’eloo, unfamiliar with childish human religious fantasies, feared that the putative heavenly guardian might be some kind of indwelling aspect of Fury itself. But Paul quickly reminded his monstrous colleague that no mature operant persona could take over a latent child’s mind, not even the unconscious, without altering her bioenergetic aura. A very simple test showed that Dorothée’s vital field, while extraordinarily complex for a nonoperant and deformed by unarticulated grief, was well within normal parameters. She was not a creature of Fury. (Whether or not an actual angel resided within the girl’s mind was deemed irrelevant to the investigation, but Throma’eloo remained intrigued by the possibility.)