Diamond Mask Page 8

  The three younger, operant Macdonald children eventually took degrees in metapsychology from Edinburgh’s medical school. But Ian, even then a Rebel, matriculated instead at the North of Scotland Agricultural College in Aberdeen. Upon receiving his degree in xenohusbandry he emigrated to the planet Caledonia just as his father had done and filed a homestead application for an airfarm on the rugged northern continent of Beinn Bhiorach, which had just been opened to settlement.

  About that time Kyle and Masha attempted a reconciliation. She had been chosen to be a magnate, and both of them attended the inaugural session at Concilium Orb when the Human Polity first took its seats. But the old conflicts between them resurfaced more virulently than ever, exacerbated by Kyle’s envy of Masha’s success. At the end of the inaugural session she washed her hands of him and returned to Earth while Kyle slunk back to Caledonia and went on an imperial toot.

  Ian Macdonald, hoping to lift his father out of his despondency, invited Kyle to join him in working the airfarm. Although Kyle hastily declined (he was not a man fond of hard physical labor, except in the pursuit of pleasure), he was touched by his eldest son’s gesture. He and Ian saw each other frequently during the two years it took to get the new enterprise established, and Ian became sympathetic to the Rebel cause his father had espoused.

  Then, in 2054, Ian Macdonald visited Earth for the awarding of his brother Lachlan’s first degree. At the ceremony in Edinburgh Ian met the woman who would become his wife and the mother of Diamond Mask.

  Poor Masha, observing the divine thunderbolt strike her eldest son and the fledgling Doctor of Psychophysics, Viola Strachan, must have suffered a sickening attack of déjà vu. Once again a brilliant, scholarly, operant young woman with a distinguished career ahead of her had fallen hopelessly in love with a handsome, latent, completely unsuitable man. That the man was Masha’s own flesh and blood was quite irrelevant. She did everything she could to break up the romance, even revealing to Viola intimate details of her own unhappy marriage to Kyle. But her efforts were unavailing.

  Viola Strachan was not a conventionally beautiful woman, but she was vivacious and possessed of an intense personal magnetism, an adjunct of her coercive metafaculty. Young Ian’s romantic colonial background, his air of taciturn mystery, and his compelling sexuality overcame all Masha’s appeals to logic. The couple was married at St. Patrick’s Church, Cowgate, and immediately returned to Caledonia, where the reality of life on a colonial planet hundreds of lightyears from Earth only gradually became evident to the starstruck bride.

  Caledonia has an austere magnificence and is richly endowed with natural resources, but no one has ever called it an immigrant’s paradise. Few of the so-called ethnic worlds are, being more marginal in human preferenda and harder to colonize than the more appealing cosmopolitan planets that are open to settlers of any Earth nation. To encourage people to live on the more difficult worlds, the Milieu allows human ethnic groups that it judges to have sufficient “dynamism” to found colonies almost exclusively populated with their own stock. In contrast to the motley human culture of the cosmop worlds, the people of the ethnic planets make a special effort to reflect the heritage of their Earthling ancestors. For instance, an ethnic colonial government may encourage the day-to-day use of an old native language or dialect now severely restricted on Earth, provided that the citizens are equally fluent in the Standard English of the Human Polity. Ethnic costume (authentic and colorfully bogus), native arts and crafts, traditional occupations and the like are also de rigueur, insofar as they are not contrary to civilized usage, economically detrimental, sexually repressive, incompatible with the mandated Milieu standards of education and social justice, or xenophobic.

  Thus, it is meet and just for Caledonians to speak the Gàidhlig or mangle the Guid Scots Tongue, wear tartans (whether entitled to them or not), idolize golf, go flyfishing with Spey rods for naturalized Caledonian salmon, celebrate Highland Games, distill and guzzle Scotch whisky, eat cullen skink, cock-a-leekie, bashed neeps, cranachan, and mutton, make pets of collies, Scottish terriers, long-horned Highland cattle, and Shetland ponies, play bagpipes, and designate “Westering Home” as the planetary anthem. But they are forbidden excesses of ethnic fervor such as clan blood feuds, the humiliation or massacre of Sassenach (English) visitors, passing laws requiring all inhabitants to eat haggis, or forcing children to do manual labor rather than go to school.

  Since Caledonia was one of the earliest ethnic worlds settled after the Great Intervention in 2013, its population was already fairly large—approaching a million people—when Viola Strachan arrived in 2054. Many of the first generation of settlers had come from the Hebrides and the Scottish Highlands, but there were also citizens of Scottish blood who had emigrated from the Lowlands, from other parts of Britain, from Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. As might be expected in a group having strong Celtic genes, there was a sizable community of stalwart metapsychic operants, as well as many lower-grade metas with more modest mindpowers. In accordance with the social engineering policy of the Milieu, over half of the normal populace were high latents like Ian Macdonald, who carried genes for strong metafunction and might be expected to engender operant descendants in good time.

  The bias favoring meta colonists on the ethnic worlds, which seemed reasonable and proper to nonhuman Milieu policymakers desiring to encourage coadunation of the Human Mind and its eventual embrace of Unity, was destined to be one of the significant factors in the Metapsychic Rebellion of 2083. When Viola Strachan first set foot on the Scottish planet twenty-nine years earlier, its nonoperant element (including her husband and father-in-law) was already flirting with sedition, while the metas were mostly enthusiastic supporters of the exotic-dominated Galactic confederation.

  Caledonia’s star, a solar-type G2 V, is 533 lightyears away from Earth. Its inhabited fourth planet is a trifle larger than Earth but not nearly as massive, covered with a vast hydrosphere (laconically known as The Sea) in which smallish continents and many volcanic island arcs are sprinkled. A large Earth-type moon travels in an orbit rather close to the planet, causing very high tides. The mountainous north and south temperate-zone landmasses have glaciers that constantly give birth to icebergs. An extensive mantle of clouds, together with smoke and airborne ash from the abundant active volcanoes, makes the climate generally chillier than Earth’s, while the ocean is comparatively warmer and shallower, with teeming aquatic life.

  The native flora and fauna of Caledonia have not evolved much beyond the equivalent of our Mesozoic Era. Its genome is terrestrial-equivalent, and minimal ecoengineering by the exotic races rendered the place compatible to introduced Earth crops, fish, and domestic livestock. The most advanced native animal species are the myriad gorgeous birdlike creatures and a class of ferocious invertebrate predators bearing an embarrassing resemblance to the Krondaku. (Members of that ancient, ultraintelligent race rarely visit Caledonia for this reason, in spite of its unique geology, superlative fossils, and outstanding local booze.)

  Most of the colonists live in twelve continental states: Orcadia, Nessie, Cairngorm, Ardnamurchan, Atholl, Strathbogie, Katrine, Argyll, St. Andrews, Caithness, Beinn Bhiorach, and Clyde—site of New Glasgow, the capital, and Wester Killiecrankie Starport.

  The economy of the planet is largely dependent upon exports, and when Viola lived there it was still not totally self-sufficient. A much-sought-after renewable resource are the exquisitely beautiful Caledonian pearls, fashioned by native artisans into high-priced jewelry much coveted by the Poltroyan race as well as by humankind. Fully automated mines produce industrial diamonds, inexpensive gem-quality diamonds of many colors, fiber graphite, buckyball carbon, lanthanides, and gold. Some continents have extensive sheep ranches, where bioengineered animals yield fine wool famed throughout the Human Polity. In the cities there are fabric mills and garment-making establishments, although a lot of handweaving and knitting is also done as a cottage industry in the more remo
te regions. Glom components, nanotech equipment, gourmet honey, and the better brands of Caledonian single-malt whisky were at that time exported to the nearest human cosmop world, Okanagon, then a populous Milieu Sector Base and the home of the Twelfth Fleet. In those days Caledonia also enjoyed extensive tourist trade from Okanagon, which was only nineteen lightyears away, and from the “Japanese” ethnic world Satsuma, twenty-seven lights distant.

  By far the most interesting aspect of the local economy, and one unique to this single human colony, is the cultivation of native balloonflora that yield peculiarly valuable biochemicals. In the mid-twenty-first century, airfarming was the fastest-growing commercial enterprise on Caledonia, but one that was risky as well. Ian Macdonald was already experiencing difficulties due to undercapitalization when he brought his new bride Viola to Glen Tuath Farm, a primitive homestead nestled amidst precipitous crags at the head of a great fjord on the northern end of Beinn Bhiorach.

  The continent is roughly dumbbell-shaped, measuring some 1200 kilometers from north to south and 400 at its widest from east to west. It lies a good 9000 kloms from Strathbogie, the nearest landmass to the southeast. In 2054 it boasted only a single municipality that could be dignified with the title of “city”—the state capital of Muckle Skerry on the southern coast. This place had a large biochemical plant, a brand-new shopping mall, a medical center, governmental and law enforcement offices, and a fast-proliferating gaggle of grog-shops, clip joints, bordellos, and recreational drugstores that catered to the hardworking miners, ranch hands, agriworkers, airfarmers, fisherfolk, and other dwellers in the sticks who egged into town on weekends to whoop it up in a civilized setting. There were no institutions of higher learning or metapsychic research in Muckle Skerry or anywhere else in Beinn Bhiorach. The other twenty-one permanent settlements of the frontier continent were very small, ranging from market towns and fishing hamlets to lonely trading posts in the interior mountain ranges. The only settlement within 300 kloms of Glen Tuath Farm was Grampian Town, population 2200, a center for barley-growing and the site of two important distilleries and a brewery.

  Ian worked his holding with the help of seasonal contract workers, some of whom owned their harvesting aircraft. Viola, an energetic young woman, willingly took over the bookkeeping and purchasing, supervised the airfarm’s domestic robotics and ground personnel, and spent long hours transforming the bleak collection of prefabricated buildings into an oasis of dramatic beauty. At the same time, she gestated the couple’s first baby, Kenneth, who was born—regrettably frail of body and metapsychically latent—in 2055.

  Like her mother-in-law Masha before her, Viola Strachan compensated for her disappointment in the nonoperant child by turning once again to neglected academic pursuits. The branch of psychophysics that had been her specialty involved a good deal of mathematical analysis that required no other equipment than her own talented brain and a computer with satellite-linkage that put her in touch with the University of New Glasgow. Through that institution, Viola could communicate with fellow researchers on worlds throughout the galaxy. Early on, she began to specialize in statistical cerebroenergetics, with a special emphasis upon the potentially injurious effects of mind-boosting equipment upon CE operators.

  Ian was more than willing to have his wife resume her scientific career, even if it meant that he would have to hire a domestic manager to take over her erstwhile duties. He worshipped Viola, finding it almost incredible that such an exceptionally talented woman would have agreed to marry him, bury herself in a colonial wilderness, and have his children. He was so deeply in love that he would have done almost anything to please her. For two years they seemed to be happy, in spite of the fact that little Kenneth was a sickly child who failed to thrive. The meta therapists in New Glasgow declared that there was no chance that he would ever achieve operancy, even though his intellect was exceptional.

  Then Dorothea was born in 2057—also latent but quite healthy—apparently having a prodigious mentality, with truly extraordinary suboperant metafaculties that might conceivably be released if the appropriate stimuli were applied. Unfortunately, Caledonia did not then have the facilities to handle the baby girl’s case properly. For accurate evaluation and treatment she would have to be taken to Earth.

  Viola was bitterly disappointed that this second child, like the first, was not an operant. She began to reassess her marriage and saw her handsome husband in a new, much less flattering light. It seemed clear to Viola that the meta shortcomings of their children were a result of his genetic input, and she felt increasingly stultified by the intellectual isolation of farm life as well. She became withdrawn and cool to Ian and began to exert her considerable coercive power upon him, urging him to sell the airfarm and return to Edinburgh with her and the children, so that their daughter at least might have a chance to reach her enormous mental potential.

  Ian at first agreed. The farm was going through an especially rocky period and he was discouraged and overworked. He would be able to get some kind of job Earthside, and Viola had already been offered a good research position at her alma mater. But then Ian’s father Kyle Macdonald caught wind of what was about to happen, egged over to Beinn Bhiorach from Clyde, and in an impassioned man-to-man dialogue managed to change his son’s mind.

  Viola was thunderstruck when Ian then flatly refused to sell Glen Tuath. All of Masha’s warnings about the impossibility of an operant woman having a successful marriage with a normal man now came home- to Viola. She finally looked at her husband with complete objectivity … and decided that she no longer loved him.

  Less than a year after Dorothea’s birth, Viola Strachan told Ian Macdonald that she was going to divorce him. She returned to Earth on an express starship, taking Kenneth and Dorothea with her. At first she moved in with her sympathetic mother-in-law Masha, who was then a full Professor of Clinical Metapsychology at the University of Edinburgh as well as a Magnate of the Concilium. Later Viola rented a townhouse of her own and the children were cared for during the day at a nursery school.

  For the next four years Viola worked in the university’s Department of Psychophysics together with her older brother Robert Strachan and his wife, Rowan Grant, until all three of them were slain on a day that changed the history of the Galactic Milieu.

  ISLAY, INNER HEBRIDES, SCOTLAND, EARTH, 26–28 MAY 2062

  THERE WERE MANY OTHER TOURISTS AT DUN BHORAIRAIG BESIDES Professor MacGregor-Gawrys and her party, but all of them were adults except Dee and Ken, and so the student archaeologist who was their guide pitched her lecture at a rather rarefied level. The dun was an ancient stronghold on a knoll high above the Sound of Islay. It had been extensively excavated and it featured a small museum with dioramas and exhibits in addition to the partially restored ruins. The two children liked the museum, but they soon became bored by explanations of the diggings and wandered off by themselves. Ken was eager to snoop through the rubble in hopes of finding some treasure that the scientists had overlooked. But Dee was feeling odd again, and all she wanted was to stand quietly at the edge of the parapet, staring down the long rough slope leading to the seashore.

  Even in bright sunlight, with the expanse of water shining and birds warbling in the heather, she could not escape the feeling that something very bad was going to happen. By instinct, she connected the premonition with the strange aetheric atmosphere of Islay itself, which had made it seem so much more sinister than neighboring Jura when she had viewed both islands from the ferry. She had never felt this way before, and it was very unpleasant.

  Closing her eyes, she set about to delete the disagreeable sensation with her new self-redactive faculty. She greeted the invisible, silent angel, took up the proper box, opened it, freed the soothing redness, and let herself float effortlessly upon it.

  There, she said to herself. Now nothing can hurt me. It’s all right. Yes—

  “Dee! Look at this! D’you think it might be ancient?”

  The spell broke and her eyes flew open. It
was Ken, holding what looked like a rusty bit of crinkled wire under her nose.

  She gave a cry of consternation. “I was trying to use my new power and you spoiled it!”

  Ken grimaced. “You fixing to upchuck again?”

  “No! I just … feel funny.” She looked at him sidelong. “Don’t you get weird vibes from this place?”

  “No.” He was clearly uninterested. “I’m going to show this doodah I found to the archaeologist. It could be important.”

  Smoldering with indignation, Dee watched him go back toward the crowd of tourists. Boys! A grungy old piece of wire was important—but she wasn’t. It would serve Ken right if the terrible thing happened to him.

  But as soon as the thought passed through her head, she repented of it. Not Kenny, she prayed. Please, angel, don’t let anything happen to my big brother.

  Her malaise was forgotten. She trotted off after him, calling: “Wait for me!” She caught Ken up just as the archaeologist was examining his find and pronouncing it to be a hairpin of late-twentieth-century vintage. The adults gathered round were laughing and Ken’s pale features had gone bright pink with embarrassment.

  “Don’t fash yuirsel’, laddie,” said a stout middle-aged man wearing a marmalade-colored sports jacket and trews in the gaudy Buchanan tartan. He was standing with Gran Masha and the other members of the family. “Losh, at least yuir een were sharp enow to identify the wee whatsit as a human artefack. That’s verra commendable.”

  Gran Masha said, “How kind of you to say so, Evaluator. May I present my grandson Kenneth Macdonald and his sister Dorothea … Children, this is Evaluator Throma’eloo Lek, who is a Visiting Fellow in Forensic Metapsychology at Edinburgh University. He is also here on a holiday visit.”