Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (10 page)

In spite of the fact that their minds were disparate, the two young people fell instantly in love. Brilliant, operant Masha, who had lived only for her studies up until then, was enchanted by Kyle’s dynamic personality, his roguish good looks, and his screwball sense of humor. He in turn thought she was the loveliest creature he had ever seen, with a cascade of shining red hair, eyes like living emeralds, and a passionate temperament that she had successfully kept under control until Kyle Macdonald inspired her to cast restraint to the winds.

To the horror of her academic family, Masha dropped out of Oxford to spend the winter with the dashing Scottish scribe in his cruck-frame cottage on a windswept, romance-laden Hebridean island. The following spring the pair announced that they would marry. Masha was carrying Kyle’s child, a boy of great metapsychic potential whom they planned to name Ian. The Gawrys and the MacGregor families gritted their teeth, shielded their thoughts well, and professed to be delighted. The newly-weds planned to move into more civilized digs in Edinburgh once the baby was born. Meanwhile, Kyle finished writing his second madcap transmedia best-seller,
Nijinsky Takes a Quantum Leap.

Ian was born three months prematurely, but he was a sturdy child and he throve under intensive neonatal care, seeming little the worse for his abbreviated tenure in the womb … except that his substantial metafaculties, like those of his father, proved to be intractably latent.

When it became evident that her firstborn son would not achieve operancy, Masha fell into a profound depression and seemed to lose interest in the baby. A nanny was hired and the young mother enrolled at the University of Edinburgh. There she resumed her studies under the benevolent eye of her maternal uncle, Davy MacGregor, who would later be appointed Planetary Dirigent of Earth.

During the next five years Masha and Kyle had three more children, Lachlan, Annie Laurie, and Diana, all powerful operants. Kyle’s comic novels continued to top the best-seller lists and four of them were converted into blockbuster Tri-D shows. The most notable,
Cream Cheese for Birkhoff’s Bagel
, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2036, and only lost because of the enduring prejudice of the Hollywood cinéaste establishment against any production smacking of sci-fi.

Masha earned doctorates in medicine and metapsychology, eventually deciding to devote her talents to latency research. At the same time, her relationship with her husband grew stormier and stormier as a widening gulf opened between operant wife and nonoperant husband. Their quarrels were Homeric, especially when Masha took Kyle to task for neglecting his writing in favor of the more amusing perquisites of authorship—parties, travel, and the occasional overly attentive female fan. He was also an enthusiastic tosspot (one of the reasons we two got on so famously). The pressures of Kyle’s celebrity, Masha’s increasing impatience with his frivolous behavior, and her preoccupation with her own important work eventually caused the marriage to break down. They separated in 2044, but over the years there would be reconciliations, and they were never formally divorced.

Happy-go-lucky insensitive egotist that he was, Kyle had never considered the possibility that Masha would actually abandon him and take the children. His writing career faltered, and for six years after she chucked him out of their Edinburgh home he produced nothing, passing the time in drinking, gambling, sexual dalliance, and touring colonial planets of the Human Polity, supposedly in search of inspiration.

In 2051, when he was nearly broke, he attempted to pull himself together and wrote another novel,
Mustangs of the Sombrero Galaxy.
After this proved to be an excruciating flop, he emigrated with his tail between his legs to the Scottish ethnic world of Caledonia, where he became Writer in Residence at the colony’s small University of New Glasgow. He taught creative writing classes to earn bed and board in the faculty apartments and spent most of his free time in seedy pubs, ranting against perceived injustices in a Galactic Milieu run by elitist operants such as his perfidious wife, and cadging free drinks from science fiction fans who remembered his days of glory. When the Rebel faction expanded to include normals as well as metapsychic operants, he became one of its most eloquent literary proponents, achieving polity-wide notoriety as well as an improved bank balance by writing dark satires traducing the Milieu.

Through the years of his separation from Masha, Kyle Macdonald faithfully sent loving and hilarious letters to his four children back on Earth, describing his largely fictitious adventures on far-flung worlds and latterly on the interesting Scottish planet. Ian, Lachlan, Annie Laurie, and Diana grew up believing that their father was a colorful adventurer living a fascinating
life, while their mother seemed to place them second to her duties as a researcher at the University of Edinburgh and an Intendant Associate for Europe.

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 remote 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.