Diamond Mask Read online

  The MESSAGE WAITING telltale on the desktop communicator was blinking unheeded—perhaps with a plea from the professor’s wife, Lucille Cartier, that he come home and go to bed. (Formidable personality that she was, Lucille would never have dared to disturb her husband’s work with a telepathic summons.) Denis’s dreams, Fury noted, were innocuous, even banal, involving the cultivation of bizarre strains of orchids in his home greenhouse.

  The egregious twit!

  On another night, Fury might have invaded those dreams to give Denis a personal taste of the horrors madness might evoke in the metapsychic personality … but not tonight. There was more urgent business to attend to.

  After scrutinizing the newly written book chapter and sneering at the worst of its misperceptions, Fury used the professor’s computer terminal to access a highly confidential file of galaxy-wide cerebroenergetic research projects. Having no physical voice, the monster activated the input microphone by means of psychokinesis. It had learned this trick, and certain others, by observing Jack the Bodiless. In an encrypted delete-protected volume tagged RESTRICTED ACCESS: BY ORDER OF HUMAN MAGISTRATUM was an updated précis of the research being done at Edinburgh by Robert and Viola Strachan and Rowan Grant.

  Fury studied this data with mounting dismay. Damn them! They were moving in the very direction it had feared. The monster cursed the circumstances that had prevented it from checking out the update sooner. If the Scottish workers managed to publish their findings, there was a good chance that Marc’s dicey E15 cerebroenergetic project would be shut down in the ensuing uproar over operator safety.

  That would have to be prevented.

  Erasing the dangerous data files and replacing them with innocuous material would be easy. Ensuring that the three Scots did not discover the fiddle and raise a flaming row was more difficult—but Fury already had a notion how the problem might be resolved.

  First, however, a brief check on the E15’s progress.

  Eliminating all trace of its illicit access to Denis Remillard’s computer, Fury gave the professor a final glance of contempt and then abolished its presence in the administration building. It reappeared an instant later on the second floor of the CE lab. There, inside a chamber crowded with workbenches and racks of apparatus, two scientists were totally absorbed in their work.

  The elder was a very tall, powerfully built man twenty-four years of age. His name was Marc Remillard and he was the grandson of the eminent Denis. In addition to holding the Marie-Madeleine Fabré Chair of Cerebroenergetic Research at Dartmouth College, he was conditionally acknowledged to have the most powerful farsensory, metacoercive, and metacreative faculties in the Human Polity. He had just been nominated a Grand Master and Magnate of the Galactic Concilium. His acceptance, as well as the affirmation of his mental status, was still pending.

  Fury had yet to decide whether Marc was a true antagonist or a potential ally in its grand scheme.

  The enigma sat now at the console of a late-model Xiang analytical micromanipulator, intent upon the holographic display. The command headset of the machine was nearly buried in his untidy black curly hair, and its two short, hornlike antennae projected vertically above his temples, giving him an uncanny resemblance to a young Mephistopheles. His eyes were the luminous gray of brushed steel, set deeply in shadowed orbits, and his brows had a winglike shape, being narrowest just above the distinctive aquiline nose that characterized so many members of the Remillard family. Marc wore a faded green twill shirt over a white cotton turtleneck, a pair of tattered Levi’s, and muddy Gokey chukka boots. Caught at the edge of one pocket flap by its barbless hook was a tiny artificial fly that Fury recognized as a Number 18 Black Gnat.

  Marc’s unofficial colleague, also dressed in grubby outdoor clothing and perched on a high stool, was a ten-year-old boy. From time to time he attempted to explain to his elder brother what he was doing wrong, only to be sedulously ignored. Jon Remillard was a child prodigy, a prochronistic mutant whose intellect was arguably the most powerful of any entity in the Galactic Milieu—always excepting members of the ineffable Lylmik race. Marc and the other members of the Remillard family vacillated between regarding the boy as a potential saint or a world-class pain in the ass. To Fury the wretched child was the Great Enemy who would have to be destroyed eventually, no matter what the cost.

  Two rod cases and a pair of battered Orvis tackle bags lay on the floor beside the micromanipulator. The two brothers had evidently come to the lab directly from a session of evening flyfishing, and had felt impelled to burn the midnight oil.

  The object of their attention, invisible within the machine, where it was being worked upon by means of microscopic tools controlled by telepathic transmissions from Marc’s command headset, was a tiny synorganic intraventricular enhancer. The SIE, less than a millimeter in length, was both a computer and an endocrine-function stimulator. It was designed to be inserted, together with similar units of slightly different design, into the hollow spaces within the human brain. Externally energized SIEs were capable of triggering neurochemical production and causing other profound changes in brain activity, greatly augmenting that organ’s own processing abilities. The effect was described by lay people as “mind-boosting,” and by metapsychic professionals as cerebroenergetic enhancement.

  Fascinated, Fury hovered behind the oddly matched pair and watched the split holodisplay above the console. In the left-hand section was the 200x image of the SIE itself, looking like a gnarled and leafless bush with a myriad of finely looped branch-lets. It was hung about with several dozen multicolored objects called electrochemical initiators that bore a resemblance to quaint Christmas ornaments. A single ECI was targeted with a red circle. The further magnified image of this particular device, opened like a Fabergé egg of outlandish design, filled the right-hand side of the display. Tiny testing probes and quasi-living miniature tools guided by Marc’s thoughts had latched onto the innards of this minute object. Graphical and numerical analyses of its output flickered continually beside the image as Marc attempted to fine-tune the program of a newly modified gallium-lanthanide operating module that controlled the ECI’s complex neurostimulation effects.

  “That revision of the glom’s not going to mesh with your changes in my SIECOM program,” said the ten-year-old, after his brother had completed a certain painstaking adjustment. “Look what’s happening to the simulated NMDA functions. They really suck.”

  “Ferme ta foutue gueule, ti-morveux,” Marc said pleasantly. “Je m’en branle de ton opinion.”

  Distracted for a moment by the fascinating new French obscenity, the boy’s face lit up. “You do what to my opinion? Shake? … No, it means something really filthy! Tell me, Marco! Or just open your mind so I can translate.”

  Marc’s laugh was wicked. “Not a chance, pest.” Another level of his mind continued feeding program changes into the ECI.

  “Please! It’s the very latest fad among Dartmouth undergraduates, cussing in one’s ancestral tongue. It’s very important that I be au courant in Franco slang. It enhances my prestige and helps compensate for the fact that I’m so much younger than the other freshmen.”

  “Ask Uncle Rogi. I learned my stuff from him.”

  “But he won’t teach me the really interesting old vulgarisms. He says I’ll have to wait until I’m a teenager. And I can’t sneak into him to root out the phrases on my own. His mind is curiously impenetrable to redactive infiltration, in spite of the fact that he’s such a weak meta otherwise. Of course I’d never coerce him—”

  “Quiet! I’ve nearly got this damned thing ready.”

  “It’s not going to work right. You deviated too far from my original infusion parameters. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “Programming the ECIs my way will give us more efficient feed back to the third-ventricle SIECOMEX when all twenty-six of these little hummers are cooking. Ah … there we are. Finished at last.”

  “But, Marco—”

  Ignoring
the child’s flood of revisionary expostulation, Marc’s mind said to the machine: Integrate and consolidate all modifications. Open test path to SIECOMEX. Energize. Ready for Mode One ECI operational simulation. And now GO you bastard!

  The boy shook his head gloomily as the analyzer began its model cerebroenergetic operation. “You’ll get better feedback, all right, but you’ll also mess up the brain’s limbic functions—destabilize the model CE operator’s mental equilibrium as his creativity is enhanced. Look where the NMDA factor’s going! You know that this config of the E15 is already marginal for operator safety. Your cobble is going to push it right smack over the edge.”

  “Give it a chance, dammit! It’s only started to run.”

  But after only three minutes of simulation had passed, the projection showed that any CE operator whose analog brain held the modified SIE would suffer acute schizophrenia—and very likely have epileptic seizures as well.

  Fury bespoke an imperceptible curse.

  Marc groaned and said, “Welcome to Shit City.”

  The little boy said, “I told you so. The simulation’s going into grand mal and it’s crazy as a bedbug.”

  Marc halted the test, took off the command headset, and massaged his aching temples. “It looks like you were right after all, shrimp. I was trying for too much, too fast in this configuration … I should have stuck to the original concept you dreamed up on the river this evening instead of trying to embroider it. Now we’re well and truly fucked. Nearly five hours of work wasted.”

  “Just backtrack,” the child urged. “Kill the divagination starting from CAH Path 83.4. We’ll still be able to crank up creativity by a factor of more than thirty if we reprogram the glom and fix the ECI infusors my way.”

  Marc glanced at his wrist-chronograph and flinched. “My God, look at the time. Almost half past two, and you’ve got three seminars tomorrow! Grandmère Lucille’s going to kill me if she ever finds out I kept you up so late. We’ll have to pack it in, kiddo, and get you back to the dormitory. You can do your own mind-wipe of the proctors.”

  The boy’s face crumpled in disappointment. “I really want to see if this will work, and you know I always get more sleep than I really need. Let me take the comset! I can do the fix lots faster than you can. Please!”

  “Oh, no you don’t. You know you’re not supposed to use this equipment. Officially, you’re only an observer in this lab, even if Tom Spotted Owl did give you free run of the place.”

  “Uncle Tom’ll never know. And it’s not as if we were really doing anything wrong. It’s only a technical infringement of college regulations. Not even as bad as my staying out after hours.”

  As Marc hesitated, Fury damned the young scientist’s puritanical rectitude, together with the stubborn pride that did not want to concede that his little brother had been right after all. The monster was as keenly interested in seeing whether this experiment succeeded as the abominable child was. Its own long-range plans required that powerful new cerebroenergetic equipment be available to its Hydra component; and if these two had actually achieved a major breakthrough with the E15, then it would be imperative to squelch the Scottish spoilers immediately.

  Might metacoercion work on Marc? His brain was deeply fatigued after hours of unrelenting concentration and possibly vulnerable—given that the violation of his principles was so minor. Although the Great Enemy had never been allowed to use the micromanipulator, he knew every nuance of its complex operation even better than Marc did. There was no danger that the child might damage the equipment or harm himself.

  Fury said:

  Marc blinked, then uttered a weary expletive and handed over the command headset to the little boy. He started to rise from his seat in front of the console.

  With a crow of glee, Jack hopped from his stool. “Just stay there, Marco. You don’t have to get up. I’m going to de-bod so I can give the job my full concentration!”

  Marc sat immobile, his face expressionless and his mind tightly shuttered, as Jon Remillard—Jack the Bodiless—began blithely to disincarnate before his eyes.

  Jack had been born with the body of a normal infant, but before he reached three years of age his mutant genes accomplished a metamorphosis that was both ghastly and wonderful. Leaping millions of years of evolution, he became what other members of the human race would eventually become in the far distant future: a being Marc had dubbed Mental Man. Neither Marc nor any other person knew how the little boy felt about his unique condition; he had always cheerfully deflected any inquiries into his fundamental mind-set or mental health, and he was immune to mechanical or metapsychic probing. Only a handful of people outside the Remillard family knew of Jack’s awesome condition, for while his intellect was prodigious, emotionally and socially he was still a child, with a child’s emotional vulnerability.

  Jack had instinctively clothed himself in the guise of normal humanity from the time that his mutation stabilized. The disguise served to spare the sensitivities of others as much as to keep him from being shunned as an inhuman freak. He maintained a simulacrum of human shape nearly all of the time, even when he slept. But sometimes—most notably with his older brother Marc and with his eccentric great-granduncle Rogi—the boy let himself assume his true form.

  Jack’s disincarnation was a phenomenon that Marc had witnessed many times before, but he had never managed to get used to it.

  Fury found it supremely disgusting—especially when compared to its own ingenious reification procedure.

  “You keep those damn volatile sulfur compounds under control this time,” Marc warned the child. “I’m in no mood for a pong-up. And for God’s sake, no puddles on the floor or gooey blobs floating around in the air. Keep your shit together so you can take out what you came in with when we leave here.”

  “I’ll be neat, I promise.”

  Jack’s clothing, unfastened by psychokinesis, fell away. Then his realistic shell of pseudoflesh—the warm skin, the black wavy hair, the eyes, teeth, fingernails, and all that his unrivaled metacreativity had concocted from air, atmospheric water vapor, dust, and other odds and ends—became tenuous and ectoplasmic. His body streamed and dripped away like thick fog, the internal quasi-organs needed for certain imitative human activities dissolved, and his face melted into smoky wisps, with the excited grin and the bright blue eyes lingering longest.

  In moments, the discarded solid and liquid portion of Jack’s corporeal envelope re-formed into a gently quivering pinkish spheroid of organic soup about the size of a large grapefruit. It rested on the laboratory floor, right between a pair of small empty sneakers with muddy socks still in them. What remained of the boy, suspended in midair and looking mysteriously elegant rather than repulsive, was a glistening, silver-gray naked brain that housed a mind preeminently operant in all of the metafaculties. In this form Jack processed input only through his ultrasenses, communicated via telepathy, and acted by means of psychokinesis and the metacreative function. His life-processes were self-sustained redactively by direct interaction with the atmosphere and photons of light. Jack the Bodiless was invulnerable to most injury, immune to disease, and could, at any time, refashion for himself a new human form or any other material housing that struck his fancy.

  Fury could neither inflict physical damage upon Jack nor penetrate his perfect mental screen with a coercive-redactive ream. Nevertheless, if this experiment succeeded, the first step in the ultimate destruction of the Great Enemy would have been taken.

  The micromanipulator comset that had been hovering above the floating brain settled into place. Since the device had a noninvasive brainboard interface and could respond to thought input, it was as easy for Jack to use as it was for an embodied person.

  Nervous telepathic giggles bubbled in the aether. Jack said: First the wipe & then TheBigTweak!!!

  He began the modification and the holographic imagery of the improperly modified ECI seemed to go wild. Displays indicating the progress of the
work turned into a featureless blur as tools darted in and out of nowhere at lightning speed, plucking at the electrochemical unit, tearing it down and building it up again. Microscopic organelle supply-slaves zipped hither and yon in the fluid of the model brain ventricle like demented bacteria, carrying tiny bits and pieces for insertion or disposal. When the ECI modification was finished, a glom command fleck completely reprogrammed by Jack through molecular-beam epitaxy was married to the SIE’s central processor.

  Marc watched incredulously as the operations that had taken him hours to accomplish were done in less than twenty minutes by his mutant brother. His admiration was frankly tinged by the envy that had lately begun to undermine the compassion he felt for young Jack’s grotesque physical condition. Was Mental Man really to be pitied—or was he, the embodied one, the true unfortunate? What would it be like to be free of nearly all of the body’s needs and limitations? To be able to channel all vital energies toward cerebration? Jack did require a limited amount of sleep, but most of his other physical functions were automatic. When he wore a body, he ate and drank only to be sociable. He never experienced physical pain because he had not bothered to fashion the receptors within his pseudoflesh. His mind’s function was hardly ever skewed or limited by the biochemical deterioration that occurred in an ordinary person’s body during the course of a day’s work. He would never be driven to irrational actions by turbulent sex hormones—

  Jack said: There that’s done let’s run a full Mode2 simulation shall we?

  “Yes,” said Marc aloud. “Go ahead with a regular helmet test.” Whatthehell we might as well know whether we’ve got a hot new CErig here or just another bloodybonkerbucket.

  In actual operation, a complete set of the newly redesigned SIEs would be incorporated into a CE helmet having an external energy source. When a person donned the helmet and gave the proper telepathic command, his skull and cerebral tissue would be penetrated by a series of hair-thin electrodes nicknamed the “crown of thorns,” the tips of which would come to rest within the cerebral and diencephalic ventricles, three fluid-filled hollow places in the operator’s brain. The drilling procedure was only minimally uncomfortable as the scalp was pierced, since the brain itself was insensitive to pain. At another command, 26 SIEs with their two supervisory SIECOM units would emerge from the electrode-tips and bloom within the right and left lateral ventricles. A single master SIECOMEX unit would unfold within the third ventricle, above the brainstem. When the CE equipment energized, the operator’s mental potential would, in theory, be greatly multiplied. Unfortunately, certain other brain activities might also be augmented by improperly tuned implants, leading to side effects that ranged from mildly annoying to fatal. The risk to the CE operator increased in direct proportion to the amount of mental enhancement generated by the equipment, especially in metacreativity designs.