Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (6 page)

D
URING THE BRIEF RHOCRAFT FLIGHT FROM
E
DINBURGH TO THE
west coast of Scotland, the five-year-old child who called herself Dee studied the durofilm sea chart that Gran Masha had given her. They were going to travel to their holiday destination in a very special way—not in an ordinary inertialess egg-bus but on an old-fashioned ferryboat nearly a hundred years old.

From the air, the boat looked like a strange toy, its contours dimmed by mist; but then the egg landed at the dockside pad and Dee and the others disembarked and were able to see the ancient vessel closely. It was huge, looming there in the drizzle, as unlike the small pleasure boats of Granton Harbour near Dee’s home as Edinburgh Castle is unlike a regular townhouse. The ferry had a scarlet funnel and a black-and-white hull and an earsplitting whistle that echoed from shore to shore in the rainswept narrow sea-loch. It seemed to urge those on shore to get aboard quickly or be left behind.

Mummie took one of Dee’s hands and Aunt Rowan took the other. Loudspeakers on the ferry broadcast an eerie bagpipe melody as they went up the gangplank. Tall, imposing Gran Masha in her smart green tweed walking suit led the way, towing Dee’s brother Ken, and Uncle Robbie brought up the rear carrying their bags.

“This is weird,” Ken said, as they all arrived on the wet and windy deck. Pennants were flapping, passengers in raingear were laughing and taking pictures, and a ship’s officer was directing people to move along. “Maybe,” the boy added, “we’ll have a good time on this holiday after all.”

“An inquiring mind,” said Mummie tartly, “will find things to enjoy no matter what place it finds itself in.”

“It’s going to be fun,” Gran Masha declared. She gave Ken’s hand an encouraging squeeze and smiled at Dee, who cringed as the ferryboat whistle gave another deafening hoot. Then the gangplank rose, the mooring lines were cast off, and they were on their way.

Groundcars bound for the Western Isles had been driven up a ramp into the hold and abandoned there; but the humans and the handful of exotic tourists making the voyage rode in the upper part of the ferryboat, where there were places to eat, and places to sit and look out of the windows at the gray sea, and a game room, and a souvenir store, and even tiny cabins to sleep in if you were traveling to one of the Outer Hebrides that were depicted on Dee’s chart, all connected to each other and to the Inner Hebrides and to the mainland of Scotland by a web of red lines that signified the Vee-routes of the egg transports. Only a handful of the Western Isles were served by the picturesque old ferries, whose routes were shown by black dots.

One of those islands was Islay.

By the time Dee and Ken finished exploring the vessel with Uncle Robbie and rejoined the three women, who had settled down with coffee in the spacious forward saloon, the ferryboat had come to the end of the protected waters of West Loch Tarbert and entered the rough open sea. The deck began to tilt in an alarming fashion, huge waves rolled past like gray mountains on the march, and the Scottish mist changed to heavy rain that splattered the saloon windows as though a giant hose had been turned on.

Ken thought that was exciting. “Maybe this big old tub will sink, and we’ll get to ride in the lifeboats!”

“The ferry will not sink,” Mummie said firmly. “Don’t be ridiculous, Kenneth.”

Dee was terrified that her older brother might be right. Gripping the arm of a seat to keep from losing her balance, she felt her stomach give an ominous leap. She took a deep breath and commanded it to stop that. No one must suspect how frightened she was!

Ken asked how long the trip would take. “Only two hours,” said Robert Strachan. “It’s about fifty kloms from the terminal at Kennacraig to Port Askaig on the eastern shore of Islay where we’ll be landing.”

“I hope the rain lets up soon,” Rowan Grant murmured. Like
her husband, she wore a rain-resistant grintlaskin sportsuit. Hers was wine-colored and his was royal blue with white stripes up the arms and legs. Petite Viola Strachan was more elegantly dressed in gray woolen slacks, a black silk blouse, and a repelvel Burberry.

“The forecast promises fair skies by this afternoon,” said Masha.

“I still wish we’d gone to the Elizabethan Immersive Pageant,” Ken said. But his mother cut him off, handing him a credit card.

“That’s quite enough, Kenneth. You and Dody may go and get something to eat if you wish. Or find someplace to sit and read the guide-plaques you brought. We grownups have some academic matters to discuss in private.”

“Oh, boy! Food! Come on, Dee!”

Ken went lurching off happily, but Dee felt much too queasy to eat. Her stomach was not obeying her order to behave itself and she was becoming dizzy as well. Fortunately, Mummie and the others never noticed her distress. She was very glad of that. It would be inconsiderate to bother them when they wanted to talk about really important things. While her brother headed for the ferry snack bar, she crept away to the other side of the passenger saloon and huddled alone in a leather seat. She had with her a small plaque with two book flecks installed, one a descriptive guide of the island and the other entitled
Birds in Islay
, with an electronic notebook for entering species observed. She loved birds, especially the bold merlins and kestrels and peregrines that were common in the countryside around Edinburgh. Gran Masha had said that they might catch sight of a sea eagle on Islay, and there would surely be many other interesting birds to look at—razorbills, puffins, and fierce skuas.

A few gulls accompanied the ferryboat now, dodging easily among the enormous ocean swells, but Dee felt too ill to look in her book and identify them. She had never seen such monstrous waves, like heaving crags streaked with foam. At first she waited, stiff with dread, for one of them to crash down on the boat and kill them all, praying to her guardian angel to take her to heaven when she died. But none of the big waves ever broke over the rail. The ferry rolled and wallowed and creaked, but it kept pounding sturdily onward, miraculously immune from being swamped, while the jaunty birds soared alongside and Dee felt more and more dazed and miserable.

I’ll die, she thought. Or even worse—I’ll spit up my breakfast and everyone will call me a baby! Oh, angel, help me.

She clung to the chair-arms with white-knuckled hands. There was a sour taste in her throat and the giddiness was getting worse.

I won’t throw up! I won’t! I won’t …

Ken was suddenly there, holding a glass of ginger beer. “Gran Masha says this’ll help calm your stomach.” He held out the drink.

“My—my stomach is fine,” she mumbled mulishly. Only troublesome children complained.

“Come on. Take it. You must be broadcasting subliminal barfvibes. Those three Gi sitting over there came twittering to Mummie and said that her poor darling little girl was getting ready to toss her cookies. Gran called me on my wrist-com and told me to bring you this.”

On the far side of the saloon, near where Mummie and the others sat, engrossed in telepathic conversation, the trio of friendly longnecked nonhumans waved their silly feathered arms at Dee and whooped and simpered.

Chagrin at being betrayed darkened the girl’s eyes. “It’s none of
their
business how I feel. The hateful snoopy-minded things.”

“Gi are supersensitive to emotions. You’re probably making them feel like woofing their custard, too. Come on, drink this.”

Ken was two years older than Dee. The lank hair falling over his brow was the color of oatmeal porridge, and his brown eyes seemed too large for his waxen, fine-featured face. He wore corduroy trousers tucked into Nesna lobben-boots and a thick Fair Isle sweater. He had left his tan anorak with the grownups.

Dee took tiny sips of the spicy, bubbling ginger beer, but it only seemed to make the nausea worse. Any minute now, she was surely going to vomit and disgrace herself. “If only the boat would stop tipping from side to side,” she moaned. “Then I’d be all right.”

“You think this is bad?” Ken gestured at the rampaging sea. “You’d feel a million times worse if you were on a starship popping in and out of hyperspace. You probably don’t remember, but Mum says you squalled like a piglet during every limbo-leap on the trip from Caledonia to Earth.”

“I was only a little baby then. And I bet
you
cried twice as much, you rotten old dumb doofus!”

Ken shrugged and flashed a gap-toothed grin. “Look,” he said kindly. “I read about motion sickness. It’s all in your head. Your
inner ear is sending wrongo signals to your brainstem’s upchuck switch because it thinks you’re off-balance and not in control of your environment. What you gotta do is show the brain that you
are
still in control. Take a good gargle of your beer and redact the pukes away.”

“I can’t,” she sobbed miserably. “I already tried. You know my mindpowers are no good.”

Ken bent closer. “That’s not true. We’ve both got really strong powers even if we’re latent, and sometimes they
can
be used if we really need them. Especially redacting—the healing power. Try hard. I did once and it worked for me.”

Dee stared at him through bleared, skeptical eyes.

“When I was really small,” he continued, “I used to wheeze and pant all the time. It was a thing called asthma. Sometimes I could hardly breathe. Do you remember?”

Dee shook her head listlessly.

“I didn’t think you would. I got it just after we first came to Earth. I took medicine and a Master Redactor tried to cure me, but it didn’t help much. The doctor said something deep inside my mind was causing it. The asthma was really bad. I couldn’t run or play ball or anything without losing my breath. Then one night when I was about your age I woke up all of a sudden feeling like I was strangling. I couldn’t breathe at all. My eyes were popping out of my head and I saw all sorts of spinning crazy lights and I kicked and tried to yell and no sound came.”

“And then what?”

“I started to die.”

Dee felt her chest constrict. She discovered that she was holding her own breath, willy-nilly. For a moment, her churning stomach was almost forgotten. “How did you know?”

Ken was whispering. “I stopped hurting and choking and I went floating up like a kite. I could still see me down below in my bed thrashing around and turning blue, but—I
really wasn’t there.
I was going away to die. It felt soooo good! … But then I remembered that Uncle Robbie was taking me to a grownup rugger game the next day, and I decided I didn’t want to die after all. I got mad and I told myself, Cut that out! You can breathe if you really want to. No more of this stupid asthma shit. No more!”

“What happened?”

“I saw my body heave this big sigh and stop flopping about. Then all of a sudden there was a kind of no-noise explosion and I was back in bed. Sucking in air. The asthma was gone.
And it
never came back.
Mum and Gran said I cured it with self-redaction.” He poked her midsection with one finger. “You can do the same thing, Sis. You really can. Try!”

Dee squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head wildly. She was afraid to do as Ken asked. The grownups were always trying to make her use her latent higher mindpowers—trying to push their way into her mind, too, so they could
force
her to be operant. But even though she was a precocious and obedient child who tried very hard not to be troublesome and inconvenient, she had always resisted giving in to the adults in this very personal matter. What was hidden in her mind belonged to her, even if it was scary. The only way she could keep herself safe was to make sure that no one else ever got inside and messed about with what was there.

She thought of the innermost part of her head as a dark and secret cellar full of strange boxes with special locks on them, the kind that wouldn’t open until you spoke a code word to their tiny internal computers. Inside the boxes, which were glassy but not quite transparent, were all the awful mindpowers that Mummie and the meta therapists had tried in vain to coerce out of her during the painful therapy sessions. The imprisoned powers shone dimly in different colors—blue, yellow, green, violet, rose—and moved about within their boxes like ghostly and dangerous sea creatures trapped in murky containers, darting at her in treacherous appeal, squirming and scrabbling against the walls of their traps like blobby, glowing starfish or demonic hands.

The angel kept her safe from them. This friendly guardian was invisible even to her mind’s eye and quite mute; but Dee was certain that he was the custodian of the dangerous boxes. They were hers and there was no getting rid of them, but the angel was the one who prevented the things inside from escaping and harming her.

Only once, long before she had found out about guardian angels, when she was still a toddling baby terrified by the adult minds trying to batter their way in and control her, had she dared to open one of those mysterious containers.
Someone
(it was a while before she realized who!) had told her the secret word enabling her to free the cool, midnight-blue shielding faculty. The power had seemed to flow out and enclose her entire mind and body like an impervious, completely transparent shell, protecting her from mental attackers.