Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) Read online

  Critics love The Galactic Milieu Trilogy

  JACK THE BODILESS

  “Witty, epic in scope and emotionally complex, Jack the Bodiless is the first in a planned multivolume tale of the Milieu. If the rest is as promising as this maiden volume, the series could well be a landmark.”

  —Los Angeles Daily News

  “A well-told entertainment presented with a great deal of skill and power.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “A glittering baroque extravaganza … A book about what it might be to be a different kind of humanity.”

  —Interzone

  “Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  DIAMOND MASK

  “[May] is one of the few such writers I not only enjoy but read with only the faintest nagging sense of guilty pleasure. Diamond Mask, Book Two of her new “Galactic Milieu Trilogy” (and eighth or ninth in a larger ongoing saga), shows why … May clothes her basic plotline with layers of political, philosophical, psychological, and scenic elements, until the most preposterous events acquire a sense of both authenticity and higher meaning.”

  —Locus

  By Julian May

  Published by Ballantine Books:

  The Saga of Pliocene Exile

  VOL. I: THE MANY-COLORED LAND

  VOL. II: THE GOLDEN TORC

  VOL. III: THE NONBORN KING

  VOL. IV: THE ADVERSARY

  A PLIOCENE COMPANION

  Intervention

  BOOK ONE: THE SURVEILLANCE

  BOOK TWO: THE METACONCERT

  The Galactic Milieu Trilogy

  JACK THE BODILESS

  DIAMOND MASK

  MAGNIFICAT

  BLACK TRILLIUM (With Marion Zimmer Bradley and André Norton)

  BLOOD TRILLIUM

  SKY TRILLIUM

  A Del Rey® Book

  Published by Ballantine Books

  Copyright © 1994 by Starykon Productions, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  The author is grateful for permission to quote from “Caledonia” by Dougie MacLean, published by Limetree Arts and Music, 29/33 Berners St., London W1P 4AA.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-37802

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77613-6

  This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  v3.1

  For Thaddeus, forever

  Every culture gets the magic it deserves.

  DUDLEY YOUNG, Origins of the Sacred

  A mask tells us more than a face.

  OSCAR WILDE, Intentions

  Sancta Illusio, ora pro nobis.

  FRANZ WERFEL, Star of the Unborn

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  KAUAI, HAWAII, EARTH

  12 AUGUST 2113

  HE KNEW IT HAD TO BE SOME KIND OF MIRACLE—PERHAPS ONE PROGRAMMED by Saint Jack the Bodiless himself. The misty rain of the Alakai Swamp ceased, the gray sky that had persisted all day broke open suddenly and flaunted glorious expanses of blue, a huge rainbow haloed Mount Waialeale over to the east … and a bird began to sing.

  Batège! That bird—could it be the one? After four futile days?

  The tall, skinny old man dropped to his knees in the muck, slipped out of his backpack straps, and let the pack fall into the tussocks of dripping grass. Muttering in the Canuck patois of northern New England, he pulled his little audiospectrograph from its waterproof pouch with fingers that trembled from excitement and hit the RECORD pad. The hidden songster warbled on. The old man pressed SEEK. The device’s computer compared the recorded birdsong with that of 42,429 avian species (Indigenous Terrestrial, Indigenous Exotic, Introduced, Retroevolved, and Bioengineered) stored in its data files. The MATCH light blinked on and the instrument’s tiny display read:

  O’O-A’A (MOHO BRACCATUS). ONLY ON ISL OF KAUAI, EARTH. IT. VS.

  The man said to himself: Damn right you’re Very Scarce. Even rarer than the satanic nightjar or the miniature tit-babbler! But I gotcha at last, p’tit merdeux, toi.

  The song cut off and a discordant keet-keet rang out. Something black with flashes of chrome yellow erupted from the moss-hung shrubs on the left side of the trail, flew toward a clump of stunted lehua makanoe trees twenty meters away, and disappeared.

  The old man choked back a penitent groan. Quel bondieu d’imbécile—he’d frightened it with some inadvertent telepathic gaucherie! And now it was gone, and his feeble metapsychic seekersense was incapable of locating its faint life-aura in broad daylight. Everything now depended upon the camera.

  Taking care to project only the most soothing and amiable vibes, he hastily stowed away the Sonagram machine, uncased a digital image recorder with a thermal targeter attached, and began anxiously scanning the trees. Wisps of vapor streamed up, drawn by the tropical sun. The sweet anise scent of mokihana berries mingled with that of rotting vegetation. The Alakai Swamp of Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands was an eerie place, the wettest spot on Earth, a plateau over 1200 meters high where the annual rainfall often exceeded 15 meters. The swamp was also home to some of Earth’s rarest birds, and it attracted hardy human students of avifauna from all over the Galactic Milieu.

  The old man, whose name was Rogatien Remillard, knew the island well, having first come to it back in 2052, when his great-grandnephew Jack, whom he called Ti-Jean, was newborn with a body that seemed perfectly normal. Jack’s mother Teresa, rest her poor soul, had needed a sunny place to recuperate after hiding out in the snowbound Megapod Reserve of British Columbia, and the island afforded a perfect refuge for the three of them.

  Rogi had returned to Kauai many times since then, most recently four days earlier, for reasons that had seemed compelling at the time.

  Well, perhaps he’d imbibed just a tad too much Wild Turkey as he celebrated the completion of another section of his memoirs …

  Crafty in his cups, he had decided to get out of town before his Lylmik nemesis could catch up with him and force him to continue the work. He’d done a damned good job so far, if he did say so himself—and he might as well, since only God knew when any other natural human being would ever get to read what he’d written.

  Even though he was drunk as a skunk, Rogi had wit enough to toss a few clothes and things into his egg, climb in, and program the navigator for automatic Vee-route flight from New Hampshire to Kauai. Then he had passed out. When he awoke he found his aircraft in a holding pattern above the island. He was hungover but lucid, with no idea why his unconscious mind had chosen this particular destination. But not to worry! His old hobby of ornithology, negle
cted for more than a decade, kicked in with a brilliant notion. He could backpack into the Alakai Swamp, where he might possibly see and photograph the single remaining indigenous Hawaiian bird species he had never set eyes upon. He landed the rhocraft at Koke’e Lodge, rented the necessary equipment, and set out.

  And now, had he found the friggerty critter only to lose it through gross stupidity? Had he scared it off into the trackless wilderness of the swamp, where he didn’t dare follow for fear of getting lost? He was a piss-poor metapsychic operant at best, totally lacking in the ultrasensory pathfinding skills of the more powerful heads, and the Alakai was a remote and lonely place. It would be humiliating to get trapped armpit-deep in some muck-hole and have to call the lodge to send in a rescuer. Still, if he was careful to go only a few steps off the trail, he might still snag the prize.

  He skirted a pool bordered with brown, white, and orange lichens, then peered through the camera eyepiece from a fresh vantage point. The luminous bull’s-eye of the thermal detector shone wanly green in futility. Despair began to cloud his previous mood of elation. The very last bird on his Hawaiian Audubon Checklist, forfeit because he’d failed to control his doddering mindpowers—

  No! Dieu du ciel, there it was! He’d moved just enough so that the infrared targeter, preset to the parameters of the prey, could zero in on it as it sat mostly concealed behind the trunk of a diminutive tree. The bull’s-eye blinked triumphant scarlet. The old man cut out the targeter, cautiously shifted position once more, and the bird was clearly revealed in the camera’s view-finder: a chunky black creature 20 cents long, seeming to stare fiercely at him from its perch on the scraggly lehua tree. Tufts of brilliant yellow feathers adorned its upper legs like gaudy knickers peeping out from beneath an otherwise somber avian outfit. The bird flicked its pointed tail as if annoyed at having been disturbed and the old man experienced a rush of pure joy.

  It was the rarest of all nonretroevolved Hawaiian birds, with a name that tripped ludicrously from the tongues of Standard English speakers: the elusive o’o-a’a!

  Nearly beside himself, the old birdwatcher used the imager zoom control, composed his shot, and pressed the video activator. Before he could take a second picture the o’o-a’a repeated its double-noted alarm call almost derisively, spread its wings, and flew off in the direction of Mount Waialeale.

  The rainbow had faded as a new batch of dark clouds rolled in from the east. In another fifteen minutes or so the sun would set behind the twisted dwarf forest and the Hawaiian night would slam down with its usual abruptness. He had barely found the bird in time.

  He touched the PRINT pad of the camera. A few seconds later, a durofilm photo with exquisite color detail slipped out of the instrument into his hand. He stared at the precious picture, now curiously dispassionate, and heaved a sigh as he unzipped his rain jacket and tucked the trophy into the breast pocket of his shirt.

  A voice spoke to him from out of the steamy air: What’s this, Uncle Rogi? In a melancholy mood after your great triumph?

  Rogatien Remillard looked up in surprise, then growled a halfhearted Franco-American epithet. “Merde de merde … so you couldn’t let me celebrate my hundred-and-sixty-eighth birthday in peace, eh, Ghost?”

  The voice was gently chiding: You have done so—and received a fine present besides.

  “You didn’t!” the old man exclaimed indignantly. “You didn’t chivvy that poor little bird here on purpose, just so I’d find it—”

  Certainly not. What do you take me for?

  “Hah! I take you for an exotic bully, mon cher fantôme, that’s what. Not even a week since I turned off the transcriber, and here you are breathing down my neck. Go ahead: deny that you came to nag me to get on with my memoirs.”

  I don’t deny it, Uncle Rogi. And I realize that the work is hard for you. But it’s necessary that you resume writing the family chronicle without delay. It must be completed before this year is out.

  “Why the tearing hurry? Does your goddam Lylmik crystal ball foresee that I’m gonna kick the bucket come New Year’s Eve? Is that why you keep the pressure on? I’ve had a sneaking suspicion about that ever since I finished the Intervention section. You and your almighty schemes! What’s the plan? You squeeze my poor old failing brain like a sponge, then toss me on the discard heap once you get what you want?”

  Nonsense. How many times must I tell you? You are immune to the normal processes of human aging and degenerative disease. You have the self-rejuvenating gene complex, just as all the other Remillards do.

  “Except Ti-Jean!” Rogi snapped. “Anyway … I could always be destined to die in some accident that you and your gang of galactic snoops in Orb prolepticate, and that’s why the mad rush.”

  The sky was completely overcast again and the tussocks of sedge and makaloa grass rippled in the rising wind. More rain was imminent. Turning his back upon the region from which the disembodied voice came, Rogi went squishing through the mire to retrieve his abandoned backpack. He hauled it up, mud-splattered and dripping.

  “Damn slavedriver. If you really did give a hoot about me, you’d do something about this mess.”

  The pack was instantly clean, dry, and as crisp and unfaded as the day Rogi had purchased it from the outfitting store in Hanover, New Hampshire, eighty-four years earlier. His initials newly adorned the belt buckle, which had once been homely black plass but now appeared to have been transmuted into solid gold.

  The old man let loose a splutter of laughter. “Show-off! But thanks, anyway.”

  De rien, said the Ghost. Consider it a small incentive. A birthday present. Hau’oli la hanau!

  Rogi frowned. “Seriously, though. My bookshop business is getting shot all to hell with me taking so much time off for writing. And I don’t mind telling you that rehashing this ancient history is getting more and more depressing. There’s a whole parcel of stuff I’d just as soon forget. And if you had a scintilla of pride, you’d want to forget it, too.”

  The personage known to Rogi as the Remillard Family Ghost and to the Galactic Milieu as Atoning Unifex, Overlord of the Lylmik, was silent for some minutes. Then It said:

  The truth about the Remillards and their intimate associates must be made available to every mind in the Galaxy. I’ve tried to make this clear to you from the very beginning. You’re a unique individual, Uncle Rogi. You know things the historians of the Milieu never suspected. Things that even I have no inkling of … such as the identity of the malignant entity called Fury.

  The old man paused in adjusting his pack straps and looked over his shoulder with an expression of blank incredulity. “You don’t know who Fury was? You’re not omniscient after all?”

  Rogi, Rogi! How many times must I tell you that I am not God, not even some sort of metapsychic recording angel—in spite of the silly nickname that was given me! I am only a Lylmik who was once a man, six million long years ago. And I have very little time left.

  “Jésus!” Rogi’s eyes widened in sudden comprehension. “You! Not me at all. You …”

  Abruptly, the rain began to fall again; but this time it was not the gentle drizzle called ua noe that usually cloaked the Alakai Swamp but a hammering tropical deluge. Rogi stood stark still in the midst of the downpour, transfixed by his invisible companion’s words, seeming to be unaware that he had neglected to pull up the hood of his rain jacket. Water streamed from his sodden gray hair into his eyes.

  “You,” he said again. “Ah, mon fils, why didn’t you tell me before, when you came to me at the winter carnival after the long years of silence? Why did you let me rave on, resisting your wishes, making a fool of myself?”

  The mind of the Lylmik Overlord erected a transparent psychocreative umbrella over Rogi, but tears mingled with rain continued to flow down the old man’s cheeks. He reached out awkwardly to the empty air.

  The Ghost said: Keaku Cave is nearby. Let’s get out of the wet.

  Rogi was conscious of no movement, but he found himself suddenly within a
fern-curtained grotto, sitting on a chunk of weathered lava in front of a small, brisk fire of hapu’u stems. Outside, a torrential storm battered the high plateau, but he was miraculously dry again. What was more, the profound grief that had pierced him seemed to have receded and he felt embraced by a great peace. He knew that the paradoxical being who had haunted him since he was five years old—the person whom he both loved and feared—had meddled once again with his mind, short-circuiting emotions that would have interfered with Its plans.

  The lava cave the Ghost had brought him into was the site of ancient mysteries sacred to the local Hawaiians, all but inaccessible to foot travelers. None of the hikers or birdwatchers or botanical hobbyists who came to the Alakai Swamp dared to visit the place. It was kapu—forbidden—and said to be protected by powerful operant Hawaiians claiming descent from the kahuna magicians of ancient Polynesia.

  Rogi had entered Keaku Cave only once before, not quite fifty-nine years ago. On that day in the fall of 2054, just after the Human Polity had finally been granted full citizenship in the galactic confederation, he and the teenaged Marc Remillard and young Jack the Bodiless had flown to the Alakai in a rhocraft, accompanied by the kahuna woman Malama Johnson. Their mission was to remove the ashes of the boys’ mother that had been sequestered in the cave a year earlier according to Malama’s solemn instructions. Rogi and the boys had found the interior of Keaku Cave mysteriously decorated with leis of gorgeous island flowers and fragrant berries. The box containing Teresa Kendall’s ashes was as clean and dry as it had been when they left it.