Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (2 page)

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.

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.