Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (20 page)
Read Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) Online
Authors: Julian May
“Quel dommage,” Paul drawled.
Severin sketched a mock bow in Paul’s direction. “No, you’ll always have the edge with the ladies. Won’t you, little bro? Nothing’s quite as sexy as unlimited political power.”
“Did you say there were luna moths hereabouts?” Philip interposed quickly. They had finally reached the summerhouse.
“I’d love to see one.” Anne relaxed on one of the chintz-cushioned settees and picked up the dumbwaiter zapper. Her lemonade glass was empty. Anne’s aging had halted in her early forties and her features were as austere and precisely chiseled as those of a Greek statue. Except on the most formal occasions, she eschewed the clerical collar and black rabat of more conventional priests. Tonight she wore a fashionable royal-blue linen trouser suit with a silk blouse the color of caramel, making Catherine in her simple beige cotton shirtwaist dress look almost mousy.
“Perhaps the First Magnate will order a command performance of his little creatures of the night,” Adrien suggested archly.
Not in the least put out, Paul dropped into a wicker chair, set his beaker of iced tea on the low table, and assumed an intent expression.
Severin nudged Adrien. The pair of them sat side by side on a second settee. “The regal coercive summons! Or is he cooking bug pheromones, do you suppose? And if he is,
where is he getting the raw apocrine components from?
”
“You’re the ex-doctor,” Adrien said. “Elucidate the disgusting possibilities—starting at his armpits and moving south.”
Paul grinned. “Sorry to disappoint you two filthy minds, but coercion’s a lot easier than creativity when you’re dealing with sex-crazed males … and here they come.”
“Oh!” Catherine’s face brightened with delight. She instinctively held out both her hands.
Full night had now descended and the only illumination came from the windows of the distant residence and from the starry sky; but all of the grandmasterclass operants of the Dynasty could see as well in darkness as they could in broad daylight if they chose to exert their visual ultrasense. What they now perceived was a fluttering squadron of large pale-green moths emerging from the canopy of trees nearby. The insects were about the size of a human hand and delicate as moonbeams. Their wings had long tails, narrow purplish margins, and four transparent eyespots. Prominent feathery antennae confirmed that the moths were indeed males. They flew into the summerhouse and orbited Catherine with exquisite precision. Then, released from Paul’s mental control, they flapped about uncertainly and began to scatter.
“How marvelous!” she said. “Thank you, Paul.”
“It was actually young Jack who decided that my new place needed some special pets. He salted the forest with cocoons last fall.” The First Magnate chuckled. “I’m glad his tastes run to Lepidoptera rather than fruit bats.”
“How’s your little boy doing?” Maurice inquired. “Settling in at Dartmouth? I don’t think Cecilia and I have seen him since Marc’s birthday party in February. Amazing, the way the two of them seem to relate almost like colleagues rather than big brother and kid brother.”
“One of the matters we’re going to discuss involves Jack’s collaboration with Marc,” Paul said.
“Oh-oh. That’ll be the new CE rig,” Philip guessed shrewdly. “Marc told me he’d had flak from the Concilium Science Directorate already, and the news of the proposed design modification isn’t a week old.”
Paul cocked his head, listening to something inaudible, then let out a sigh. “Papa’s finally here. Elsie Fitch is aiming him in our direction. Now we can get on with this bloody damned conference.”
Maurice said, “Are things really as serious as all that, Paul? I realize that Marc’s mind-booster research is ethically problematical, and Sevvy and Adrien’s anti-Unity faction has embarrassed you before the media. But surely—”
“There’s more,” the First Magnate broke in. “And it’s as serious as it gets … Anne, if you’re sending in drink orders,
make mine a Scotch rocks. Double. Somehow I don’t think plain iced tea is going to do me much good this evening.”
DENIS
: Hello, children.
PHILIP+MAURICE+SEVERIN+ANNE+CATHERINE+ADRIEN
: [Murmurs of greeting.]PAUL
: Good evening, Papa. I’m glad you could join us. Can I offer you a drink? A Hawkeye? Certainly. Excuse me for a moment while I turn on this sigma … There. Now we’re ready to begin our family conference.DENIS
: You’re shielding us, Paul? For heaven’s sake, what’s wrong?PAUL
: What we’re going to discuss concerns the family and the innermost circle of the Concilium. It’s vital that no one else hears about it—most particularly not the Planetary Dirigent of Earth.DENIS
: Davy MacGregor? But—PAUL
: Please, Papa. I’ll explain. I’ve just returned from Scotland. Three unusual murders were committed there a week ago. I have positive proof that the killer was Hydra.VARIOUS
: [Expletives and gasps.]ANNE
: The four missing Remillard children? …PAUL
: My own investigators, a forensic evaluation team from the Galactic Magistratum under Throma’eloo Lek, and the local police have gathered a fair amount of information about the perpetrators—although Lek and his Krondak associates in Orb are the only ones aside from the Lylmik Supervisors who know their true identity. Quentin, Parnell, Celine, and my own daughter Madeleine have been living on Islay in the Inner Hebrides ever since they disappeared eight years ago on the night Uncle Rogi and Jack were attacked.SEVERIN
: Son of a bitch.PAUL
: The Hydra-children fabricated new identities with the help of some unknown adult who has access to nearly unlimited, untraceable funds. Since the planet-scan done at the time of their disappearance failed to pinpoint them, we have also assumed … that they were able to change their mental signatures.CATHERINE
: Impossible!PAUL
: According to current Milieu technology, yes. But it was done. We’re virtually certain that the children themselves lacked the expertise to manage the alteration. It must have been done by Fury, Hydra’s adult controller. It was probably
also Fury in an illusionary aspect who posed as the guardian of the four children during their stay on Islay. And no one but Fury could have helped them escape again after these latest killings without leaving a single clue to their whereabouts.MAURICE
: And the Galactic Magistratum has the whole story?PAUL
: Evaluator Throma’eloo Lek was practically a material witness.SEVERIN
: Oh, shit.PAUL
: The Evaluator was vacationing on the island when it happened. He recognized Hydra’s modus operandi from his investigations of the earlier deaths and immediately called me. Here’s a précis of the findings.
[Data.]
As you can see, Lek’s bureau of the Magistratum knows almost everything except Fury’s identity and a plausible motive for the murders—CATHERINE:
And where the fugitive Hydra-children have gone.PAUL:
[Nods.]MAURICE:
This opens the old can of worms all over again. Any one of us could be Fury—or none of us! What does the Galactic Magistratum intend to do about the Dynasty?PAUL
: In this matter, as in the earlier crimes, Lek and his people ceded authority to the Lylmik Supervisors. I offered them our joint resignation from the Concilium and suggested that we all accept voluntary preventive incarceration.
[Stunned silence.]
My proposal was turned down. The Lylmik were adamant that we retain our official positions, and they intend to keep the continuing investigation as confidential as possible so that we won’t be tainted by scandal. But their protection will cease if the truth somehow leaks out. If Davy MacGregor or some other hostile magnate finds out about this matter and formally demands our impeachment, we’ll have to put it to a special vote of the plenary Concilium.SEVERIN
: And end up fucked to a fare-thee-well.MAURICE
:
Is
there a chance of keeping it under wraps?PAUL
: The Hydra-children were living in Scotland under assumed names. They’ll keep those names as far as lower-level law-enforcement bodies are concerned. The manhunt will go on—but not for young Remillards. Their DNA assays have been transferred to the fictitious identities along with all of the other forensic material.ANNE
: [troubled] It’s the same kind of cover-up that we had eight
years ago. At the time I thought the deception was despicable. I don’t like it any better now!PHILIP
: Disclose the fact that the Hydra has killed again and Davy MacGregor will surely make the entire affair public—including the fact of Fury’s existence and its probable relation to us. At the very least, we’ll all be forced to resign from the Concilium. And to what end?ANNE
: Truth. Honesty. The prevention of further killings! … Oh, God, Phil, I don’t know. Why are the Lylmik so determined to protect our family—to the point of letting five homicidal maniacs remain at large?PAUL
: Annie, it’s useless to agonize about this unless you’re prepared to defy the authority of the Supervisors and condemn the lot of us to disgrace and probably to imprisonment as well. All for the sake of a morad abstraction! No matter what we may suspect, there’s no more evidence now that one of us is Fury than there was eight years ago. Of course, we’ll all be interrogated again by Lek—but it’s largely pro forma. The Galactic Magistratum doesn’t expect to learn anything new.PHILIP
: What about Marc?PAUL
: He’ll also be put to the question, since he’s also a Grand Master who was a suspect in the earlier crimes. We’ll have to swear him to secrecy as well.MAURICE
: Has the Magistratum had any luck tracing the movements of the Hydra-children after the crime?PAUL:
N
O.
The four fugitives could have escaped from Earth by assuming the identities of genuine human passengers after having disposed of the originals, but we think it’s more likely that Fury created completely new identities and inserted them into the Human Vital Statistics Database.ADRIEN
: No way! Do you know how many layers of encryption would have to be penetrated in order to accomplish that? How many backups would have to be modified? And to make the sneetch foolproof, Fury would have to cook
every single human vital-stat database in the Galactic Milieu.
We’re talking more than seven thousand planets, exotic as well as human, to say nothing of the Lylmiks’ central database at Concilium Orb!PAUL
: There was a brief anomaly noted at Earth VitalStat in Geneva just before noon on the day after the Scottish murders. The same kind of momentary glitch affected the database at Orb pip-two-six Galactic hours later. We’ve since learned that every other vital-statistic system in the Milieu experienced an
anomalous data modification in a cascade of impulses propagated via subspace from the Orb central system. The modification was complete within twelve nanoseconds. All of the databases are currently in complete accord. It took a Lylmik to uncover the cascade and deduce what must have happened. There’s no way of identifying the fudged data.PHILIP
: Good God. The hack couldn’t have been electronic. It had to be mental …PAUL
: Hitting the computer at Geneva must have been child’s play for Fury. But to reach the base at Orb, he’d need a shaped PK-creative impulse in the gigawatt range.SEVERIN:
I’m
impressed.ADREEN
: Paul, not to put too fine a point on it, but who among us, with the possible exception of you and Marc and Jack, has the potential to perform a humongous mind-ploy like that? God knows I couldn’t zorch a computer system four thousand lightyears away with a shaped thought to save my soul. Maybe Fury’s outsmarted himself by showing off! A simple review of our metapsychic armamentaria should show who in the family is a go and who’s a no-go in the PK and creativity necessary to pull off the stunt.SEVERIN
: Don’t forget Marc’s new brain-bucket. What’s it supposed to do? Augment creativity thirty times?CATHERINE
: But he only has a design as yet—nothing operable.ADRIEN
: Marc gongs out of sight in creativity with only his naked gray. So does Jack.PAUL
: [irritably] Dammit, Jack’s not a suspect! He wasn’t even born when Brett and Margaret Strayhorn were killed, and he wasn’t
conceived
until twelve years after Vic died. There’s no way that boy could be Fury.SEVERIN
: Marc was there at Victor’s deathbed, though. He was a baby, but he was near enough for Victor to have … infected him. His mind surpasses all others in our family in every metafaculty. If we concede that Fury must be a Remillard, then Marc is the most logical suspect.PAUL
: I—I had reluctantly come to that conclusion myself.ANNE:
N
O.
It won’t wash.PAUL
: Why not?ANNE
: You’ve all forgotten the reason why we weren’t exonerated by Davy MacGregor after twice passing the truth tests on the Cambridge machine.CATHERINE
: The possibility of multiple-personality disorder. Of course!DENIS
: That does constitute a very plausible hypothesis for Fury. I’ve devoted a whole chapter to the dysfunction in my new book,
Criminal Insanity in the Operant Mind.
[Data.]
If one of us has this affliction, a second persona—normally submerged and imperceptible to the core personality—could be the malignant entity called Fury. This second persona might possess an entirely different metapsychic complexus. It could be much more powerful than the core as well as driven by a different moral imperative: Victor’s …CATHERINE
: Papa, there is no psychiatric evidence whatsoever for the transfer of a persona from a dying mind to a living one. In the recognized forms of multiple-personality disorder, the additional personas are generated in reaction to some profound trauma suffered by the core, and they split off from the core.DENIS
: That’s true. But—SEVERIN
: A last-ditch assault by Vic was enough of a trauma to stitch five fetal minds into a homicidal monster and turn poor old Louis and Leon and Yvonne into cold meat. Who can tell what else Vic might have done, striking out at the rest of us?PAUL
: And finding the one who was unconsciously vulnerable.DENIS
: If only I had not brought us all together that last Good Friday! If I had not led that presumptuous prayer! If I’d simply withheld water and nourishment when it was obvious that Victor would never emerge from his coma—ANNE
: Papa, don’t castigate yourself all over again. You did what you thought was best at the time. You aren’t to blame.ADRIEN
: If anyone is, it’s Vic. How the flaming hell could such a depraved thing be born of man and woman?ANNE
: The engendering of a moral monster is one of life’s great mysteries. But there’s one thing that psychologists and theologians agree on: In almost every case, monsters are
made
, not conceived.SEVERIN
: Then who or what made Vic?DENIS
: I’ve thought a lot about that. And I’ve talked the subject into the ground with Uncle Rogi, sifting through some of his memories of Victor’s childhood and of our parents, Don and Sunny. You all know that my poor father had a neurotic dread of his own metabilities and also a profound self-hatred. It turned him into an alcoholic and ultimately led to his death. I was Don’s firstborn and my very obvious powers terrified him. Victor, the second child, was more subtle in his operancy
from the very beginning and Don adored him. Made him his pet. My mother was an old-fashioned Catholic who thought birth control was sinful. She had ten children, one after another, and each time she was pregnant Don’s alcoholism intensified—perhaps from his sense of inadequacy because he was unable to earn a decent living, perhaps from sexual frustration if Sunny denied him or if he found her repugnant when she was with child. Don might have turned elsewhere for gratification, especially when he was crazed by alcohol. It’s taken me a long time to admit this to myself, but I now suspect that Don might have had good reason for self-hatred during his sober moments.