Diamond Mask Read online

  “Vi!” said Masha sharply, and her eyes flicked to young Kenneth, who was listening openmouthed. Both women fell silent, but it was plain that the acrimonious exchange continued telepathically.

  The boy toyed with his sandwich, now completely expressionless. Rowan Grant tried to distract him with a lecture on the wonderful things rejuvenation technology had done for his grandmother. “Someday your Mum and Uncle Robbie and I will also have ourselves made young again through genetic engineering,” she concluded brightly. “So will you! And if any of us should have an accident and be badly hurt, the regen-tank would make us well again.”

  “But it’s no good for us,” Ken muttered. “Not for little kids. I learned about it in school. A person can’t go into the tank until he’s at least twelve or thirteen, because up until then kids don’t have all the special body chemicals that make the regen thing work … And even if Dee and I wait until then, the tank can’t make our normal brains meta.”

  “Well—no,” Rowan admitted. “Thus far, regeneration technology has been unable to benefit those with latent metafunctions. The human brain is so complex that we don’t yet understand all of the genes involved in its operation. But you musn’t fret about it, dear. Things will surely change in the future. Someday, we’ll have the means to make every human being an operant. Why, even if it takes another hundred years, you can be rejuvenated over and over again until—until it happens.”

  Ken said calmly: “But meanwhile, we’ll be deadheads.”

  “Of course not!” Rowan Grant’s plain, kindly face was horrified. “Wherever did you hear that awful term? You must never call yourself that, Ken—or let anybody else do it, either. We all belong to the World Mind and we’re all important to the Galactic Milieu—operants and nonoperants alike. And you know that we love you and your sister very much, whether you’re full metas or not.”

  Ken’s gaze fell. Making no reply, he abandoned his sandwich, took a piece of spongecake, and began to pile on honeyed cream until it dripped from the side of the plate onto the carpet. Viola noticed what was happening and uttered a sharp exclamation of annoyance, but a warning thought from Masha brought her up short. She pressed her lips together and rose from her chair.

  “I’d better see what’s happened to Dody. And you, Kenneth—take a serviette and wipe up that disgusting mess at once.” She left the room.

  “Hurry back,” Masha called. “I have an important announcement to make. My great surprise!”

  When Viola finally returned with her daughter, Masha addressed them all with determined good humor. “Now, my darlings, I’m very happy to have my strong new body, but I’m not quite ready to go back to work. First, I need to spend some time with all of you to catch up on what’s been going on in the world while I was growing young again. So I’d like you to join me on a whirlwind holiday. Let’s fly away tomorrow and spend the whole weekend together at some interesting place getting to know one another all over again. Please say that you’ll come!”

  The other adults, after a brief startled pause, made encouraging noises.

  “But where will we go?” Dee asked, bewildered.

  “Anywhere you like,” Masha said. “Dorothea, you’re the youngest. You may choose the place. Just a moment while I get something out of the credenza.”

  The four components of the Hydra sitting tense in the Bentley let out their collective breath in relief. The scheme of coercive manipulation they had hatched in response to Fury’s orders hovered on the brink of bearing fruit. The professor was following the unconscious compulsion they had implanted. Now there was only the child to deal with.

  Masha produced a large durofilm map of the British Isles, which she spread on the rug in front of the fire. She handed a silver CAD stylus to her granddaughter. “Stand up, Dorothea. Now close your eyes and I’ll spin you round. Then you must kneel down and point to the map while still keeping your eyes shut, picking our destination.”

  “But what if Dee picks someplace awful?” Ken wailed. “Like Dundee or Wolverhampton?”

  “Then those of us who have creative ingenuity will use it to make the holiday rewarding,” Viola retorted. Poor Ken flinched.

  Dee took the stylus and closed her eyes, trying not to let her nervousness show. Very often she “saw” things when her optic nerves no longer received photon stimuli—not ultrasensory images, as a True Person might perceive, but pictures drawn by her own imagination. As she was turned round and round she had quick little visions of English castles and Irish horse farms and Parisian toy stores. She caught glimpses of the Elizabethan Immersive Pageant at New Kenilworth that Ken had enjoyed so much, and Disney Cosmos, and Buckingham Palace, and Elfinholm, and the great zoo at Glentrool with its strange animals from the colonial planets. She saw place after place that she and Mummie and Ken had visited on holiday. Places she would love to see again—

  She stopped spinning.

  “Now point with the stylus,” ordered Gran Masha.

  Hydra acted in full metaconcert.

  Into the mind of the little girl flashed a different kind of mental picture, like a Tri-D suddenly turned on in a dark room. She drew in a startled breath and almost exclaimed out loud because the scene was so real, so unlike any inner vision she had ever experienced before.

  It was a place. A beautiful place with fields of bright wild-flowers, green hillsides above a seashore, and a palace on an islet in the midst of a sparkling loch. She knew at once that she had never been there in her life, and she also knew that the place was real.

  “Choose, Dorothea!” Gran Masha urged gaily.

  Choose that place! something else commanded.

  Slowly, Dee knelt with her eyes still tightly shut, reached out with the stylus, then let it gently descend, still seeing the same picture in her mind.

  “Well, I’ll be gormed!” said Uncle Robbie.

  “Oh!” Mummie’s voice was full of dismay.

  Aunt Rowan said, “It must be synchronicity—or something.”

  Dee opened her eyes. Both Mummie and Gran Masha looked flustered and none too pleased. The silver stylus rested squarely on a sizable island off the Scottish coast, almost directly west of their home in Edinburgh.

  Masha sighed. “Well, it’s my own fault for letting the child decide.”

  Viola’s face tightened. “Dody can pick another place.”

  “No.” Masha was firm. “We’ll go there. The children should see the lands that their clan once ruled, and the places where their great-great-grandfather and grandfather were born.”

  “Izz-lay?” Ken was peering closely at the map in puzzlement. “Dee picked out an island named Izz-lay where … who ruled?”

  “You pronounce it EE-luh,” Gran said briskly. “Islay was the place where the Lords of the Western Isles had their seat of government in the fourteenth century. From there they held sway over all the Hebrides for two hundred years. Your ancestors—Clan Donald.”

  “Oh.” Ken spoke very softly and looked at his little sister out of the corner of his eye. “Dad’s people.”

  Their father Ian Macdonald was a shadowy figure who was seldom spoken of by Gran or Mummie. From his home on the faraway “Scottish” ethnic planet, he ordered presents that were sent to Dee and Ken from a big Edinburgh store on their birthdays and at Christmas. The gifts had brief notes attached, handwritten by some anonymous personal shopper according to Ian’s transmitted instructions and signed “Love, Dad.”

  Ken, who had been three when his parents were divorced on Caledonia, had only the most distant memory of his father, while Dee had none at all. There were no holopix or Tri-D recordings of him in Viola’s house; but Ken had discovered a single durofilm photo with I.M.—2055 written on the back, buried in a drawer full of miscellanea in his mother’s desk. He had stolen the picture and hidden it, and from time to time he would take it out and look at it, and sometimes show it to Dee. The picture was badly scuffed and faded, and showed a dashing young man in a shiny environmental suit with the mask and helmet do
ffed, standing beside some kind of odd aircraft. The scenery was unearthly and the children had decided that the picture must have been taken on the Scottish planet.

  “Islay is a lovely place for our holiday,” Aunt Rowan was saying with an encouraging smile. “Wild and strange, with a beautiful reconstruction of the medieval palace of the Lords of the Isles that serves as a museum. Your great-great-grandfather Jamie MacGregor, who was a pioneer metapsychic, was born there, and so was your grandad, Kyle. The island is a bird sanctuary as well. I think it’s an excellent place for us to visit.”

  Dee was dubious. “But if Mummie doesn’t want to go there—”

  “Of course we’ll go,” Viola snapped. “Why on earth not?”

  Masha arose and began to gather together the tea things. “You children help me clear up. Then we’ll order some flecks about Islay that you can take home to read tonight.”

  When the professor and her grandchildren had left the room, Viola Strachan said to her brother: “That was a very eerie performance by Dody. Enough to make one wonder whether Crawford’s diagnosis is entirely correct. I wonder if the child could be crypto-operant.”

  Robert Strachan left his chair and began to poke up the fire. “What makes you think that?”

  “Robbie … I was thinking of Kyle Macdonald’s birthplace when Dody made her choice.”

  “She couldn’t have read your mind, Vi. You’re a masterclass adult, as Rowan and I are. Even if the child were crypto-operant she’d be unable to penetrate your social mind-screen—much less the inner defensive barrier.”

  “But—”

  “I was thinking of Islay, too,” Rowan interrupted, her eyes wide with astonishment. “Only I thought of it as the place Jamie MacGregor came from. Now what do you make of that?”

  Robbie frowned. “God damn it all, I believe I might have had a flicker about the place myself! But for no reason that I recall.” He pondered the puzzle for a minute, then his brow cleared. “Masha! Of course—it has to be Masha who did it. She’s fresh from the regen-tank and her brain hasn’t quite settled yet. She must have had some stray thoughts of Islay. A Grand Master Creator-Redactor like her could inadvertently zap all our minds with an imaginative icon that just popped into her head. She could even penetrate a latent youngster if the erratic was heavily energized.”

  Rowan nodded. “And anything that Masha’s unconscious mind associated with that bloody fool husband of hers would carry a considerable emotional charge. Her superego would have tried to reject any thoughts of Kyle Macdonald as fast as they formed, and—pow!”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Viola said. “It’s the only logical explanation. But … I still wish we weren’t going to May.”

  But you are, the Hydra observed, and the game is afoot!

  The Bentley groundcar that had been parked outside Professor MacGregor-Gawrys’s townhouse then drove away briskly through the rain, heading for the George Hotel. Fury had insisted that the Hydra travel first class on its initial foray away from its place of exile, and the quadruplex mind had been delighted to comply.

  The ferryboat was now very close to the narrow channel between the two large islands. Some people were taking pictures or making videos, some sat in floppy canvas deck chairs that crew members had brought outside once the rain stopped, and some scanned the spectacular scenery with powered oculars. Dee stood at the rail, consulting her descriptive plaque from time to time. She was just barely tall enough to peer over the rail’s top if she stood on tiptoe, looking more like a solemn miniature adult than a child of five in her red hooded anorak and new slacks woven in the somber tartan of Macdonald of the Isles.

  Her continuing sense of vague disquiet about Islay could not be cured by self-redaction as the earlier seasickness had been. But she kept the uneasiness walled away inside her and there were no creepy Gi about to betray her private feelings, only humans out there with her on the windy, swiftly drying deck.

  The ferry was traveling almost due north now, moving into the narrow strait that separated Islay from the neighboring island of Jura. The sea was nowhere near so rough as before and strengthening sunlight had turned it from dull gray-green to deep blue. The steep face of Islay rose on the left. Cliffs and skerries had creamy surf boiling around them, and the hanging glens and rounded green heights were emerging from low-hanging clouds.

  Using the plaque-guidebook, Dee studied Islay’s modest mountains and found out the names of the highest ones, saying them softly out loud:

  “Beinn Uraraidh, Beinn Bheigeir, Glas Bheinn, Beinn na Caillich, Sgorr nam Faoileann … Boundary Mountain, Vicar’s Mountain, Gray Mountain, Mount of the Old Woman, and Steep Hill of the Seagulls.”

  “You pronounce the Gaelic very well,” said a man who stood at the rail a couple of meters away from her.

  Unlike most of the other holidaymakers, he and the dark-haired woman beside him, who had come out on deck from the saloon a few minutes earlier, were dressed in city clothes. He wore no hat and his blond hair was wildly tousled by the wind, making a strange contrast to his crisply starched shirt, red silk cravat, charcoal-gray Beau Brummel suit with black velvet collar and cuffs, and shining jockey boots. He smiled at Dee with the cool friendliness of a condescending cat, showing teeth that were extremely white. His nose was fine-bridged and prominent, and his eyes were the color of shadowed ice. He was a metapsychic operant, and Dee shivered as she felt his coercive-redactive probe sweep over her impervious mind-screen, light in its touch as a drifting spiderweb and more powerful than those of any other adults she knew. But he made no real effort to delve into her.

  “Do you know,” the man added, with a lordly wave of his hand, “that the Old Woman who gives that mountain its name is actually the Great Goddess, who was worshipped by the ancient people of the island?”

  “No. I didn’t know that.” Dee was polite. “Thank you for telling me. Some of my ancestors lived there, and that’s why we’ve come on holiday.”

  “That’s interesting. I have a home on Islay myself.” The man looked away toward the misty hills. “You’ll find there are all kinds of fascinating things to be seen. The reconstruction of Finlaggan Palace, excavations of prehistoric forts, the Kildalton Cross that dates back to the ninth century, flowering bogs and high cliffs and sea-caves alive with birds. You must be sure to visit the great cave at Bholsa! We even have a kind of demon called the Kilnave Fiend hanging about who’s supposed to make people disappear—but that’s just a folktale, of course.”

  “I’d like to hear it,” Dee said, with a grave little smile. “I love stories like that. Please don’t think I’d be frightened. I’m only five years old, but I’m a child prodigy and very mature for my age.”

  The attractive stranger burst into laughter, and his woman companion looked up from her own plaque-book, seeming to notice Dee for the first time. She was quite beautiful, and her face seemed as smooth and pale as eggshell, with rose-tinted lips and sapphire eyes framed by thick dark lashes and narrow arched brows. Her black hair was unusual, having auburn glints that were almost crimson. It was pulled tightly into a knot at the nape of her neck and crowned by a small scarlet turban that revealed a pointed widow’s peak at her brow. She wore thigh-high black boots with red heels, and a fitted coat and short skirt that were the same brilliant scarlet color as her hat. The coat had golden buttons and a golden Celtic brooch pinned to the shoulder. Its sleeves were pushed up to accommodate long black leather gloves.

  “What’s your name, little Miss Mature-for-Your-Age?” The woman was smiling, but her voice had a keen edge.

  “Dorothea Mary Strachan Macdonald. And you?”

  The man gave another bark of laughter, and this time Dee sensed that his amusement was not directed at her. A mental thrust stronger than any Dee had ever experienced before lanced into her mindscreen, which held firm. The woman’s eyes widened momentarily and then she inclined her head, as a queen might when acknowledging another royal personage. Her voice became soft and compelling, with a lilt that m
ade her seem to be half singing when she spoke. “I am Magdala MacKendal, and this is my husband, John Quentin.”

  “How do you do,” said Dee. “Now may I please hear the story of the Kilnave Fiend?”

  “Come sit down with me,” said Magdala MacKendal, “and I’ll tell it to you.” Dee obediently plopped down into a canvas chair, while the man and woman sat on either side of her.

  Long ago [Magdala MacKendal said] during the late 1500s, when the Lords of the Isles had fallen on hard times and had lost their sovereignty to the Kings of Scotland, there lived on Islay a wicked dwarf called the Dubh Sìth, which means “the Black Fairy.” He had a twisted little body and bent legs, and only his arms were strong. Black hair grew down to his eyebrows and an ugly black beard nearly covered the rest of his face, except for his pointed nose.

  The Dubh Sìth lived deep in the forlorn bogs and savage heaths of Kilnave Parish in the northwestern part of Islay, and people were very much afraid of him because of his frightful appearance. But he was also the best bowman on the island, and it was said that his arrows never missed their target. He eked out a living shooting swans and geese and other wildfowl, and bartered them for clothing and other things he could not make for himself.

  Now in those days the Macdonalds of Islay and the MacLeans of the island of Mull were quarreling bitterly over some land on Islay that the MacLeans claimed was theirs. Big Lachlan MacLean decided one day in 1598 that the time was ripe for an invasion of his neighbors and a taking by force of what was his. A local witch heard about his plans and told him he was sure to win out—provided he didn’t go on a Thursday and didn’t drink from a famous well near Loch Gruinart on Islay.

  Big Lachlan was not impressed by witches. He sailed to Islay on Thursday because stormy winds prevented his going on Wednesday, and he landed at Ardnave in the shallow bay of Loch Gruinart on the north shore. The day was hot and sultry, and as he and his army marched inland along the Kilnave track to attack the Macdonalds, Big Lachlan stopped to take a drink at the forbidden well. Not long afterward, a strange sight met his eyes. Sitting atop a rock at the pathside was a horrible-looking creature all in black, with a head of snarled hair and a face almost invisible behind a filthy beard. It was the dwarf Dubh Sìth.