Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (16 page)

On the face of it, there was no obvious motive for either murder. However, Brett McAllister had managed to convince his wife Catherine Remillard to turn down her nomination to the Galactic Concilium shortly before he was slain, and the family had been extremely disappointed. With Brett dead, Cat decided to accept. This, together with certain other suspicious circumstances, led the Magistratum to conjecture that a criminally ambitious Remillard might have murdered Cat’s husband.

The entire Dynasty, plus thirteen-year-old Marc, underwent rigorous mental probing by a Krondaku-Simbiari forensic team. The family all seemed to be exonerated; but the exotic officials had already begun to suspect that the seven adult Remillard siblings and Marc—and perhaps other powerful human metas as well—were able to screen their innermost thoughts from the usual kinds of coercive-redactive interrogation used by the Magistratum, thereby avoiding self-incrimination.

At that time, the Human Polity was still under probation and had not yet been admitted to full citizenship in the Galactic Milieu. The suspicion that Earthlings might be able to circumvent the justice system of the Milieu—plus the possibility that our planet’s most famous and powerful metapsychic family might harbor a mental Dracula—was enough to cause some of the exotic Concilium members to demand that the Great Intervention be nullified and
all
humanity quarantined forthwith, with interstellar travel permanently prohibited.

There had been serious opposition to letting us join the Milieu in the first place. We Earthlings were considered to be a mentally immature and barbaric lot, and only a summary veto by the almighty Lylmik Supervisors had prevented our world from being passed by. The Fury-Hydra hullabaloo brought the old objections to the fore once again, and once again the Lylmik saved our bacon. They insisted that the induction of humanity into the Milieu proceed as scheduled. Furthermore, no action was to be
taken against any Remillard unless there was ironclad proof of criminal activity.

One possible motive for Margaret Strayhorn’s murder, even more tenuous than that advanced for Brett’s, also seemed to point the finger at the Dynasty. Margaret’s husband Davy MacGregor was the only serious opponent to Paul Remillard in the election contest for First Magnate of the Human Polity. A widower who had taken thirty years to recover from his first bereavement, Davy had recently discovered that his dearly loved second wife was carrying their child. Her death might have been expected to cause Davy’s emotional breakdown and the withdrawal of his candidacy, leaving the field wide open for Paul. Instead, Davy held up adamantly after Margaret’s murder and vowed to track down her killer.

MacGregor narrowly lost the election and Paul became First Magnate; but Davy was appointed Planetary Dirigent of Earth, and took advantage of his august position to reopen the stalled investigation of the Dynasty. He acquired a fair amount of damning evidence by coercing
me
six ways to Sunday.

I was forced to tell him about my first encounter in 2040 with the monster called Fury. I told him how the same malignant entity seemed to show up at the birth of Jon Remillard in 2052, apparently hoping to devour the prodigious newborn mind before being thwarted somehow by me.

I told him how five other metas—including Adrien Remillard’s oldest daughter Adrienne—had mysteriously disappeared during that same summer in the immediate vicinity of the family beach house on the Atlantic coast. The girl’s death and the presence of seven chakras on her incinerated body had actually been perceived metapsychically by baby Jack as the murder was committed. The naïve infant, not realizing what he had witnessed, described Addie’s assailants to his brother Marc as “a Hydra” controlled by “Fury.” Ti-Jean was otherwise unable to identify the perpetrators and poor Addie’s remains were never found.

Paul Remillard now deduced that Margaret Strayhorn’s dying thought,
Five
, referred to the number of minds that had combined in pernicious metaconcert to form Hydra; but it seemed quite incredible that five members of the Dynasty—six, if you counted Fury—were killers somehow possessed by Victor’s demoniac passion.

Paul was torn between his innate desire to see justice done and his fear that the Human Polity might be expelled from the
Galactic Milieu because members of his family, the most powerful human minds in the galaxy, were possibly criminal lunatics. I confessed to Davy MacGregor how Paul finally allowed Addie’s death to be attributed to sharks, as the four earlier disappearances of operants had been. There was no corroborating proof, after all, that little Jack’s appalling vision had been anything except infantile fantasy, no proof that entities called Fury and Hydra existed at all.

Nevertheless, in his heart Paul remained convinced that Fury and Hydra were real—and somehow intimately connected to the Dynasty.

My evidence, even though given under duress, supplied Dirigent MacGregor with legal grounds for a new interrogation of the Remillards, this time utilizing the recently invented Cambridge mechanical mind-probe, a horrendous piece of equipment that the Spanish Inquisition would have awarded five stars in the agony category. It was supposed to reveal the infallible truth when yes-or-no questions were posed to the examinees. The Dynasty and their spouses, Denis, his wife Lucille, and young Marc were all hooked to the machine and asked the following questions:

1. Are you the entity called Fury?
   
2. Do you know who or what Fury is?
   
3. Are you the entity called Hydra, or a part of that entity?
   
4. Do you know who Hydra is?
   
5. Do you know who or what killed Brett McAllister?
   
6. Do you know who or what killed Margaret Strayhorn?
   
7. Do you know who or what killed Adrienne Remillard?
   
8. Do you know who or what killed the four operants who disappeared in the vicinity of the New Hampshire sea-coast last summer?
   
9. Do you know for a fact that Victor Remillard is alive?
   
10. Do you suspect that the Fury-Hydra murders of McAllister, Strayhorn, Adrienne Remillard, and the others have some connection to the Remillard family?
    

Everyone answered “No” to the first nine questions and the machine affirmed that they told the truth. All of the Dynasty
wives answered “No” to the tenth question and told the truth. Lucille Cartier said “No” to the tenth question and lied. Denis Remillard, his seven adult children, and young Marc answered “Yes” to the tenth question and told the truth.

Davy MacGregor asked the Lylmik Supervisors to rule upon whether or not the results of the questioning gave him grounds to continue his investigation of the Dynasty. The Lylmik decreed that they did not. Because the interrogation had been done confidentially, according to the discretion of the Dirigent, no record of it was released to the media or the Human Magistratum. The Galactic Magistratum in Orb did retain a file, however, and the
fact
of Fury and Hydra’s existence soon became the worst-kept secret among influential metas of the Human Polity—including the then-clandestine group of Magnates of the Concilium and other respected operants who would form the nucleus of the Metapsychic Rebellion in 2084.

The Rebels were the first to speculate that Fury, controller of the Hydra assassin, might be a Remillard suffering from a malignant multiple-personality disorder, possibly triggered by some deathbed mental contact with the evil Victor. His or her “normal” persona would have no inkling that a deviant Fury aspect also existed, and this meant that Fury could never be exposed by any conventional form of mental interrogation. Only a probing of the deep unconscious—a tricky and often inconclusive procedure where Grand Master metapsychics were concerned—might manage to ferret the monster out.

No one expected the Remillards to volunteer for further mental examination very soon.

The next assault by Hydra was not prompted by Fury at all, but by the jealousy of the creature itself. Earlier, Hydra had suspected that Fury was seeking ways to incorporate the powerful mind of young Marc Remillard into its mysterious grand scheme. Hydra sought to prevent being overshadowed by trying to destroy Marc, in defiance of Fury’s orders. Hydra botched the job, but it was ready to try again in 2054, when Marc had just turned sixteen. Once again Marc survived … but this time one unit of Hydra’s multiplex mind died. Fury was in a towering rage at its creature’s stupidity and had to initiate drastic damage control.

Events now rushed to a climax. At first only Marc, Ti-Jean, and I knew why Gordon McAllister, the fourteen-year-old son of Catherine Remillard and her late husband Brett, had tried to
murder his cousin Marc. But the boys and I mistakenly believed that Gordon alone was Hydra.

Fury decided that we three had to die, so that the surviving Hydra-units and the monster itself would not be exposed. I was to be eliminated first. But I was saved in spite of myself, discovering in the process that the other heads of Hydra included four other children: Celine Remillard, daughter of Maurice; Quentin Remillard, son of Severin; Parnell Remillard, son of Adrien; and Madeleine Remillard, daughter of Paul, and Marc’s own younger sister. They were all fourteen years old. Later we deduced that the Hydra-children had been in utero as their mothers prayed around the deathbed of Victor in the year 2040. Somehow, as the family’s most flagrant black sheep expired, he had been able to
tempt
those intelligent, precocious fetuses—and win them for his successor, Fury.

Escaping from Hydra’s attack with a little help from a friend, I rushed to help Marc save baby Jack, who was confined to the Dartmouth Medical School’s Hitchcock Hospital with (as we then believed) terminal cancer. But Fury got there ahead of us and set Ti-Jean’s room on fire. The miracle of the child’s rescue was described in the previous volume of my memoirs.

The four youngsters who comprised the Hydra had disappeared, but by their brazen attack on me, they had given themselves away as homicidal cat’s-paws. The Dirigent of Earth and the Galactic Magistratum conducted intensive investigations after the Hydra-children’s identities were discovered, hoping to unmask Fury. Because the Lylmik insisted upon keeping the reputations of the Remillard magnates unsullied until indisputable proof of criminal activity was obtained, everything was handled with exquisite discretion. As far as the media were concerned, the attack on Marc by Gordon McAllister was an act of adolescent insanity, and the fire in Jack’s hospital room was an unfortunate accident that had a gloriously happy ending.

But behind closed doors, all of us Remillards—including me, but not the newly reincarnated Ti-Jean, who was too young to endure the trauma—were subjected to interrogation conducted by the Milieu’s premier mind-reamer, Evaluator Throma’eloo Lek. By coincidence, this official had also put Marc to the question back in the days when the boy was suspected of having drowned me and his mother.

No fresh data were obtained as a result of the Evaluator’s best efforts. We all checked out innocent as lambs. The Hydra-children had apparently vanished off the face of the Earth—and
there was no trace of them on any other Milieu world, either. This meant that they were dead … or that by some unimaginable virtuoso maneuver Fury had managed to alter the mental signature—the unique brain-pattern that is registered at the birth of each operant child—of its four young minions. Backtracking, the investigators learned that the Hydra-units had indeed been in the vicinity of each chakra murder and attempted murder. But no adult Remillard could be similarly placed at every single crime scene, so none could be pinned positively with the Fury label. This did not prove their innocence, however. Not if the monster really was a family member with a split personality.

In the end, there was nothing Davy MacGregor and the Magistratum could do but abandon the investigation. Neither Fury nor the Hydra were heard from again until eight years had passed, and even then they might have escaped notice had it not been for Evaluator Throma’eloo Lek and little Dorothea Macdonald.

Fury had made an excellent choice when it decided to hide its creature on Islay in the Scottish Hebrides. By the mid twenty-first century the island had only about four thousand permanent inhabitants. Because of the Milieu’s social policy of compelling the best and brightest of humanity (especially those with metafaculties) to achieve their highest potential, only a handful of elderly, invalid, and intransigent metas were allowed to continue living on the remote island. Every one of these possible threats to Hydra’s security died conveniently of “natural causes” not long after the fourfold creature took up residence on Islay.

The possibility of meta babies being born to normals remained, especially since so many of Islay’s inhabitants had Celtic genes. (This meant that an exceptionally large percentage of the population were promising latents with unlimited reproductive licenses who might be expected to engender operant offspring.) But here again Milieu law inadvertently kept the island free of operant residents who might detect the creature. Since there was no metapsychic preceptorial facility on Islay, normal parents with meta newborns were obliged either to move to the mainland in order to live near such a school or else give up their children to operant foster care. This particular aspect of the hated Reproductive Statutes remained on the books even after the Human Polity achieved full Milieu citizenship, and it served Fury’s purposes well. While thousands of meta tourists visited
picturesque Islay each year, none stayed long enough to detect the anomalous aura of the Hydra.

Details of the creature’s covert years on the island, and of the crimes perpetrated by the Hydra while it lived there, were revealed piecemeal during the intensive investigation into the deaths of Viola Strachan, Robert Strachan, and Rowan Grant. The Magistratum was able to determine from residual DNA traces and circumstantial evidence that the four Hydra fugitives had resided at Sanaigmore Farm ever since they fled New Hampshire. The young quartet officially took up residence on Islay in mid-2054, although it was probable that they had occupied the supposedly vacant farmhouse for some months before that. Sanaigmore was purchased in June of that year on behalf of the Eumenides Corporation of Elysium by one Frederick Urquhart Ramsay Young, a man of unmemorable appearance who represented himself to the local authorities as an interstellar export-import entrepreneur. That the acronymous Citizen Young was filthy rich became evident after he contracted for the extensive renovation of the isolated old farmstead, turning it into a handsome country residence with all mod cons and then some, including an independent power supply and a satellite uplink.