Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) Read online

  Sitting in the cave now, knowing that the unseen Lylmik Overlord lurked close at hand, the old man seemed once again to smell the anise scent of mokihana. He remembered Marc, a stalwart sixteen-year-old, and Ti-Jean, apparently only a precocious toddler, on their knees beside the small polished pine box holding their mother’s remains. They had asked Rogi to carry the urn to their waiting rhocraft, since he had been her protector during the greatest crisis of her life.

  Teresa’s ashes had been scattered over the green tropical ridges and canyons on a day of resplendent rainbows. In the years that followed, Jack the Bodiless returned often to the island of Kauai, visiting his great friend Malama and eventually making his home there, bringing his bride to the place he loved more than any on Earth. But Marc Remillard had never set foot on the island again.

  “Are you glad?” Rogi asked abruptly. “Glad it’s almost over?”

  The Ghost’s reply was slow in coming:

  I had feared that I was fated to live until the very consummation of the universe. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that, even though God knows I richly deserved it.

  “Tommyrot! You sincerely believed that the Metapsychic Rebellion was morally justified. Hell, so did I! Back then, lots of decent people had serious doubts about Unity. Maybe not to the point of going to war, but—”

  My principal motive for leading the Rebellion had nothing to do with the Unity controversy. I instigated an interstellar war because the Milieu condemned my Mental Man project … because it rejected my vision for accelerating the mental and physical evolution of humanity. With me, Unity was only a side issue.

  Rogi looked up from the fire in surprise. “Is that a fact! You know, I never was too sure just what that Mental Man thing was all about.”

  The Ghost’s tone was ironic: Neither were most of my Rebel associates. If they had known, they might not have followed me.

  “And the Mental Man project was—was so wrong that—”

  Not wrong, Rogi. Evil … There’s a considerable difference. It took me many years to recognize how monstrous my scheme actually was, to understand just what kind of galactic catastrophe my pride and arrogance might have brought about.

  “It didn’t happen,” Rogi said very quietly.

  No, said the Ghost, but there remained a grave necessity for me to atone, to make up for the damage I had done to the evolving Mind of the Universe. My sojourn in the Duat Galaxy was a partial reparation, but incomplete. The evil had taken place here, in the Milky Way. The Duat labors were exciting, satisfying—joyous, even—because Elizabeth shared them with me and helped me to fully understand my own heart. Before we came together, my self was unintegrated; I had no true notion of what love meant.

  “I don’t agree,” the old man said stubbornly. “Neither would Jack.”

  The Ghost was not to be sidetracked. It continued:

  When the Duat work was done, Elizabeth was weary and ready to pass on. She begged me to follow her into the peace and light of the Cosmic All … but I could not.

  Instead, I felt compelled to return here. Alone, cut off from every mind that had loved me and from the consoling Unity I had known in Duat, I undertook what I judged was my true penance: to assist the maturation of our own Galactic Mind.

  Through years that seemed without end I guided one promising planet after another, cajoling civilization from barbarism, altruism from savagery. Of course I could not truly coerce the developing races of the Milky Way. I only assisted the inevitable complexification of the World Mind that accompanies life’s evolution.

  I made many ghastly mistakes.

  Can you conceive of the doubts that assailed me, Rogi, the fear that I might have succumbed to a hubris even more immense than that which originally obsessed me? No … I see that you can’t understand. Never mind, mon oncle. Only believe me. It was a terrible time. Le bon dieu is as silent and invisible to the likes of me as he is to any other material being. I could not help but ask myself if I was committing a fresh sin of pride in thinking that my assistance was needed.

  Was I helping the Galactic Mind, or merely meddling with evolution again, as I had been when I tried to engender Mental Man?

  Our galaxy has so many planets with thinking creatures! Yet so few—so pathetically few!—ever achieved any sort of social or mental maturity under my guidance, much less the coadunation of the higher mindpowers that leads to Unity. But finally, perhaps in spite of my efforts rather than as a result of them, I found success. The Lylmik were the first minds to Unify, and I adopted their peculiar race as my own. Then, aeons later, the Krondaku also achieved coadunation.

  After that came a great hiatus, and I feared that my infant Galactic Milieu was doomed to eventual stagnation and death. But le divin humoriste elevated the preposterous Gi race to metapsychic operancy against all odds (the Krondaku were deeply scandalized) and not long after that the Mind of the engaging little Poltroyans matured as well. The Simbiari were accepted into the Milieu next, even though they were imperfectly Unified. And suddenly there seemed almost to be an evolutionary explosion of intelligent beings, burgeoning on planet after planet—not yet ready for induction into our confederation, but nevertheless making great progress.

  One of the less likely worlds in this group was Earth.

  Knowing what I do, I overruled the consensus that rejected the human race as a candidate for Intervention. The result was the Metapsychic Rebellion, a towering disaster that metamorphosed into triumph. And now the Mind of this galaxy stands poised at the brink of a great expansion you cannot begin to imagine …

  “Are you going to tell me about that?” Rogi asked.

  I cannot. My own role in the drama is nearly complete and my proleptic vision fails as my life approaches its end. Assisting you to write the cautionary family history will be my last bit of personal intervention. Others will oversee the destiny of this Galactic Mind henceforth and guide it to the fullness of Unity that is so very, very close.

  The old man fed the fire with an armful of tree fern stalks as Atoning Unifex fell silent. The swirling smoke seemed to slide away from a certain region near the cave entrance. Out of the corner of his eye (his mental sight perceived nothing) Rogi caught occasional hints of a spectral form standing there.

  “What next, mon fantôme? You gonna snatch me back to New Hampshire through the gray limbo like you did the last time, on Denali?”

  Would you rather write the Diamond Mask story here on Kauai?

  Rogi brightened. “You know, I think I would! She and Ti-Jean did honeymoon here, after all.”

  There is also the matter of the Hydra attack that took place here.

  Rogi’s brow tightened. “Maudit—why’d you have to remind me about them?” He fumbled with the side compartment of his backpack and took out an old leather-bound flask. Unscrewing the cap, he tossed down a healthy slug of bourbon. “To do a proper job on Dorothée’s early life, I’ll have to tell all about those poor, perverted bastards. Just remembering ’em turns my stomach.” He took another snort.

  The Ghost said: I can alleviate your gastric distress more efficiently than whiskey can, if you’ll permit the liberty.

  Rogi gave a bark of nervous laughter. “And will you be able to flush my skull of Fury dreams, too?”

  The Lylmik’s thought-tone was wry: I’ve had experience with them myself, as you may recall. I’ll build you a protective mental shield—

  “Hey! Now wait just a damn minute!”

  The Ghost was insistent: It can be done while you sleep, so you’ll have no experience of invasion whatsoever. I can leave all your precious neuroses intact, but you must permit me to install the dream-filter. It would be the height of ingratitude on my part if your writing chores precipitated anxiety and a fresh bout of alcohol abuse. You will suffer no nightmares, I promise. We Lylmik are the most skilled redactors in the universe.

  “Oh, yeah? Then where the hell were you when Fury and his Hydras were doing their metapsychic vampire act back in those thrilling days of ye
steryear?”

  Our interference would not have been appropriate at that time. The crimes of those entities, heinous as they were, were necessary to the evolution of Higher Reality, just as the Metapsychic Rebellion was.

  “I,” the old man declared wearily, “do not give a rat’s ass for the Higher Reality. Or the Lower, for that matter.” He lifted the flask again.

  Rogi—

  “All right! Go ahead and fix my brain so I don’t go apeshit after dredging up those old horrors. But don’t you dare try to do me any favors plugging in Unity programs or any other Lylmik flimflammery.”

  The phantom in the cave’s darkened entrance now seemed to be approaching the fire, and Rogi stared in fascination at the way the smoke wafted about the invisible form. As the Lylmik mind spoke soothingly and the liquor did its work, the old man suddenly caught his breath. For an instant, he thought he’d glimpsed a man’s face there in the shadows—one he remembered all too clearly. He surged to his feet, calling out a name, and tried to throw his arms about the evanescent shape; but he embraced only a cloud of smoke. His eyes began to sting, and he pulled a bandanna handkerchief from his hip pocket and blew his nose, subsiding back onto his rocky seat.

  The Ghost said: Vas-y doucement, mon oncle bien-aimé! Think only of the memoirs. When you complete them, I’ll be able to go in peace.

  The old man mopped at his eyes. “Batège! Who’d have thought I’d get all soppy over you? A goddam figment of my goddam booze-pickled imagination! That’s what Denis and Paul always said you were. Merde alors, it makes more sense for me to believe that than the cosmic bullshit you’ve been dishing out.”

  If it makes you more comfortable, by all means believe it.

  “I’ll make up my own mind what to believe,” the old man muttered perversely. Then he asked: “Where do you think I should settle in to do the writing? Down at the old Kendall place in Poipu?”

  I have a better suggestion. How about Elaine Donovan’s lodge near Pohakumano? It’s at a high enough elevation to be cool, and no vacationing Remillards are likely to bother you there, as they well might down at the coast. The house is isolated and it has been kept in excellent condition by caretakers, even though Elaine has not visited it for many years. You’d find it very comfortable and much quieter than Hanover in the summertime.

  “Elaine …” Rogi’s face stiffened. “I didn’t know she had a vacation house on Kauai. But she was Teresa’s grandmother, of course.”

  I can arrange to have your transcriber and any other personal items you might need brought over from New Hampshire. Even your cat, Marcel, if you like.

  “I—I don’t think I better stay at Elaine’s place.”

  The thought of her still brings you pain?

  “No, not anymore.”

  Then use her house. You know she wouldn’t mind.

  The old man sighed. What did it matter, after all? “All right. Whatever you say. Bring my stuff and old Fur-Face, too. And a stock of decent food and liquor.” He stretched, easing his aching muscles. It had been a long day, and now it was pitch black outside and the rain was pouring down harder than ever. “I don’t suppose I could spend the night here in the cave, could I?”

  Do you wish to?

  Rogi shrugged. “It feels real good in here. Metasafe! If I’m going to stay on the island, I guess I’ll have to ask Malama Johnson to tell me more about this place. Funny thing—when you and I first brought Teresa’s ashes here after the funeral Mass at St. Raphael’s in the cane fields, Malama seemed to think you’d been here before.”

  [Laughter.] Kahunas know too much. They are an anomalous type of human metapsychic operant, as any Krondak evaluator will tell you … And now, why don’t you make yourself something to eat and then get some sleep. I have other matters to attend to and I must leave you for a time. I’ll come and collect you in the morning.

  “Suit yourself,” said Rogi, and opened his backpack.

  Even though there was no discernible physical manifestation, the old man was aware that the Family Ghost had abruptly vanished. Shaking his head, Rogi took out packets of gamma-stabilized food and a tiny microwave stove and began to prepare a Kauaian-style supper of chicken-feet appetizers, fried rice, Spam, pineapple upside-down cake, and lilikoi punch. As he ate, the small mystery of why he had been drawn to Kauai also seemed to resolve itself. The birds, of course. The island had always been a magnet for amateur ornithologists like himself.

  And like Dorothea Macdonald, the subject of this next part of his memoirs.

  It had been her doing that brought him here—or perhaps that of her memory abiding deep within his own unconscious. Dorothée. Saint Illusion. The woman who always wore a mask, even in her youth, when her face was bare.

  * * *

  Much later, when he was snug in his sleeping bag and the fire had gone out and the continuing rain had freshened the air, Rogatien Remillard let the tranquil ambiance of Keaku Cave lull him to sleep. The air was fragrant again now that the smoke had dissipated; but oddly enough the scent seemed not to be that of mokihana berries but rather of a certain old-fashioned perfume called Bal à Versailles.

  How did I know that? Rogi asked himself drowsily. More huna magic? Or are the Family Ghost and Dorothée still playing games in my head?

  A moment later he was fast asleep, dreaming not of the monster named Fury and its attendant Hydras, nor even of Diamond Mask. Instead he dreamed about a woman with silvery eyes and strawberry blonde hair who had first smiled at him on top of Mount Washington in New Hampshire, years before Earth knew that the Galactic Milieu even existed. It was a sweet dream, without remorse.

  In the morning, Rogi had forgotten it completely.

  FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

  UNITY!

  God, how we Earthlings were afraid of it, in spite of all that Paul and Ti-Jean and Dorothée did. Quite a few normals still have their doubts—and so do I. A minority of one: the only uncoadunated meta head still at large.

  I’m still a Rebel. The very last unconverted human operant, shunning Unity’s consolations, thumbing my nose at the Coadunating Noösphere, evading all that magical, mystical superstuff that the Milieu confers on good little minds who participate in Teilhardian ultracerebration. All the other human operants live in Unity. Even those odd young people—some of them my own kin—who escaped the Pliocene Exile have undergone the initiation and signed on as conditional uniates. But not me. No siree! I’m not much, but what there is, is straight up and 190 proof Everclear.

  What’s more, the Milieu can’t do a thing about it. Up until the reappearance of the Family Ghost and my embarking upon these memoirs, I thought the Unanimity Affirmers had just overlooked me. After all, I’m no high-powered meta, just an unimportant old bookseller making no particular use of my meager powers … unless I’m really backed into a bad corner.

  But that isn’t the reason I escaped.

  At this late stage of the game I realize that my apparent immunity was all part of the Family Ghost’s plot. I was allowed to evade the Unity net so that the really outrageous deeds I had witnessed or perpetrated wouldn’t be exposed to public scrutiny too soon, as they would have been if I had been forced to Affirm and hang out all my mind’s dirty laundry during the initiation.

  Earlier on, especially during the crucial decades immediately following the Metapsychic Rebellion, the time just wasn’t ripe for the revelations contained in these memoirs. The Remillard family—even the ones who were dead or otherwise removed from the chessboard by then—were still too important to the grand game to be accidentally traduced by the likes of me.

  Now those considerations are moot. Even the most scandalous doings of my illustrious family can be revealed in these chronicles because the tenure of Atoning Unifex, Overlord of the Lylmik and founder of at least two Galactic Milieux, is finally at an end. I have been assured that uncounted billions of entities as yet unborn will study these processed words of mine, making God knows what of them. I have not been told what cons
equences will fall upon me, their author, once the memoirs are published and the cat’s out of the bag.

  C’est une bizarrerie formidable, mais c’est comme ça et pas autrement!

  And it’s probably wiser not to think about it.

  HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE, EARTH 9 MAY 2062

  NINETEEN DAYS BEFORE THE MURDERS WOULD TAKE PLACE IN SCOTLAND, at a little past two on Tuesday morning, Fury prowled the campus of Dartmouth College.

  Only an occasional groundcar moved along North College Road in front of the School of Metapsychology. There were no pedestrians. The elegant buildings of the meta complex were set on a wooded slope, where the spring foliage of spreading sugar maples and tall mutant elms gleamed in the light of old-fashioned iron standard lamps set along paved walkways. At this hour the buildings themselves were mostly dark. There was a single pair of lighted windows in the office block and several more in a line on the second floor of the Cerebroenergetic Research Laboratory further uphill, which had been established less than two years earlier with a generous (and still controversial) endowment by the Remillard Family Foundation.

  For a moment Fury paused to survey the scene. Long ago, before the Great Intervention, a ramshackle old gray saltbox building scheduled for imminent demolition had given grudging shelter to the college’s infant Department of Metapsychology, and its workers had been regarded with bemusement and a fair amount of uneasiness by fellow academics of more traditional scholarly disciplines. These days, the Dartmouth School of Metapsychology was one of the premier research establishments for higher mindpowers in the Human Polity of the Galactic Milieu, and a favorite object of Fury’s scrutiny.

  Tonight the monster’s mission was more urgent than usual.

  Fury proceeded to insinuate itself into the faculty offices. Its virtual presence was imperceptible to the senses of normal people, to the metafaculties of operant humans and exotic beings, and to the sensors of mechanical security systems and janitorial robotics.