Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (26 page)

Wagging his head sadly, the writer appealed to the little boy and girl. “Do you hear how unkindly your dear Grannie speaks to me? But it’s all a sham, you know. All these years we’ve been apart, she’s never lost her love for me nor I my heartfelt devotion to her. That’s why she’s come with you to Caledonia.”

Masha uttered a brittle laugh. “I’m only escorting the children, Kyle. And I’ll only stay long enough to make certain that Ian is in a position to give them proper care. I have no intention of burying myself in a provincial backwater with a gaggle of kiltie barbarians. Now, if you’re quite sure that you’re feeling up to it, let’s be on our way. I’ll meet you and the children at the egg park on the roof after I find the hotel’s subspace transmitter and send off some work I managed to finish on the voyage.”

Waving aside Kyle’s offer to take her overnight case, she sailed into the hallway and headed for the lifts.

Dee said, “I don’t mind if you carry
my
bag, Grandad.” She held it out and smiled shyly when he took it from her. “Kenny and I are very glad to be here. We think Caledonia is … an interesting place.”

Ken shot an anxious look at his grandfather. “It’ll be all right, won’t it? I mean, Dad really does want us, doesn’t he?”

“Of course he wants you,” Kyle declared aloud. But his mind said: Ha! He’s cursed himself for a sentimental berk ever since the black day he shot his mouth off but he’s too pigheaded to go back on his word.

Ken giggled with relief. Dee’s smile never wavered even though she felt her heart turn to ice.

Kyle Macdonald lowered his voice and bent down to speak more confidentially. “Now you listen up, bairns. Your Dad’s a hardworking man who’s doing his best to earn a living in one of the most rugged places on the whole planet. He won’t have time to cosset you or waste time playing kiddie games. He’ll expect you to help with the farm work as best you can and take care of your satellite-school studies without being nagged over it.
He’s a fair man, but he can’t abide crybabies or layabouts, and he’ll be disappointed and impatient if you get squeamish or frightened about the new things you’re going to encounter out in Beinn Bhiorach. Do you hear what I’m saying?” … You’d better hear or you’ll find yourselves well&truly up it!

Ken nodded gravely but his thoughts were a panicky howl: I’m going to be eversobrave for Dad yes even if I have to eat creepyfood but whatabout Dee she could make Dad angry doing her scaredybabyshit and whatabout her damnstupidmindpowers if she gets sent back to Earth then Dad might make ME go too it’s not fair why did I have to have a weirdheadsister like her I think I
hate
her—

“Glen Tuath’s in a very lonely part of the world, but the big house is comfortable and there’s lots to explore and do in your spare time. A pair of paleontologists are staying at the place and digging up fossils. You can go boating on Loch Tuath, and visit the diamond and buckyball mines, and watch Ben Fizgig volcano blow its stack. There’ll be other children for you to play with—the workers’ kids and the three nonborn fosterlings that Ian’s taken in. They’re older than you, but you’ll manage. Every few weeks your Dad’ll take you to Grampian Town or Muckle Skerry for a wee bit of excitement while he gets supplies, and I’ll egg in now and then and steal you both for a holiday in New Glasgow or in some other amusing place. As soon as you’re a bit older you can learn to fly and tend the skyweeds.”

Ken said, “Wow! I’d love that!” But I bet Dee would be tooscared to learn and toodumb besides.

“You must promise me not to fash your Dad by moping or getting homesick for big-city Earthside ways,” the writer warned them. “He won’t take kindly to that sort of hassle.” He’s got troubles enough keeping the farm from going under and fending off Thrawn Janet …

“I understand,” Ken said.

“Me, too,” Dee added quietly. “I’m very mature for five.”

“We’re in luck,” Kyle told them, as they all boarded the egg. It was a sporty white Porsche, nearly new, with stubby heat-dissipation fins. Dee overheard Gran Masha thinking: How in the world can he afford it? Or has he found a way to make Rebellion pay?

When the writer took off his cap, he revealed a polished dome of bare freckled scalp protruding from an encircling tangle of gray. Dee stared at the unusual disfigurement, fascinated. She
had seen pictures of bald men, of course; Shakespeare was bald! But a simple genetic engineering procedure developed over forty years earlier had all but abolished male pattern baldness on Earth. Why hadn’t Grandad grown new hair?

“We’ll have decent weather for sightseeing as we fly across Clyde and also at northern BB around the farm,” Kyle said. “In between’s rather a filthy mess with one storm after another, but we’ll fly high above them until we put down for lunch on Strathbogie. I’ll do a little travelogue in the clear spots and you bairns can decide for yourselves whether or not Caledonia’s a barbarian backwater as your lovely Grannie says. Of course she’s never been here so she might possibly be wrong.”

“H’mph,” snorted the professor. She had the rear banquette of the egg to herself while the children sat on either side of their grandfather in front.

Hazy sunshine had turned the Caledonian sky the color of skim milk. Except for the colorful foliage, the environs of Wester Killiecrankie did not seem particularly exotic when seen from the air. The clusters of warehouses, offices, and industrial buildings near the spaceport did not look much different from those in the commercial parts of Edinburgh, while the houses and apartments resembled those of the Scottish metro hinterlands. Many dwellings were built of handsome white-painted stone and the majority stood in the midst of spacious gardens or fronted onto landscaped commons. As the egg followed an urban Vee-route northward along the coast the children saw a golf course, a big glass-roofed shopping mall, and business parks adorned with plantings and tiny lakes.

“Are all the cities on Caledonia as pretty as this?” Ken asked.

“Hardly,” said the writer with a wry grin. “The Wester Killiecrankie Starport’s quite new, only twenty years old or so, and it was carefully planned to be a showplace for arriving visitors, with quakeproof buildings and all … We do get the occasional temblor now and then! The older settlements like my own hometown of New Glasgow have some run-down parts that need spiffying up—and some of the mining towns are ugly as sin. But by and large, we Callies have kept the planet tidy.”

“Is that what the citizens call themselves—Callies?” Ken asked.

“That’s right. And in the Gaelic ‘caladh’ means ‘a safe haven,’ so we often call the planet Callie, too.”

“The steep hills with the patches of different colored trees look like they’re wrapped in great big tartans,” Dee said softly.

“Right you are, lass.” Kyle gave her an approving nod. “Back in the beginning, after the Great Intervention, the Simbiari Proctors were setting up the first batch of ethnic worlds, and the Scots being an especially dynamic group had their pick of three or four that were all surveyed and had reasonably high human compatibility. This planet won hands down, even though it’s a wee bit rugged and shy of dry land, because of the plaidie look of its forests and the fine crags and waterfalls and louring mountains.”

“Sheer romanticism,” huffed Gran Masha. But Grandad only laughed.

Once they were out of the controlled airspace around the city, the writer began to show off his piloting ability, free-flying the powerful Porsche along the Clyde coast at barely subsonic speed so that they could admire the dramatic fringe of steep, tusklike islands north of the starport. With nonchalant skill he zigzagged among the towering skerries at a perilously low altitude with the sigma off. Their wind-of-passage made an eerie howl, Ken shrieked with excitement, and Dee used her redaction to keep from becoming ill. Gran Masha ignored the aerobatics while she read an academic journal.

Then Kyle turned inland and ascended into a mid-altitude transcontinental Vee-route, relinquishing control of the rhocraft to the computerized traffic system. There were only moderate numbers of other vehicles moving with them in the arterial airway—nothing approaching the congestion of central Scotland, where the skies always seemed circus-bright with endless streams of colored flying eggs on hundreds of intermeshing programmed vectors.

Traveling now at nearly 2000 kph they traversed Clyde’s interior Lothian Range, a wilderness of jagged black-and-red peaks that comprised the remnants of extinct volcanoes. The highest of them had glaciers on their northern slopes even though the continent was near the planetary equator. Fast-flowing rivers, gleaming like twisted platinum threads, carved out precipitous valleys heavily forested with bronze-colored, bluish-green, and scarlet trees. Nestled amongst the high ridges were chains of lakes, often bordered with vivid golden patches of vegetation that the writer called “fearsome bottomless peat bogs.” Very few roads traversed the highlands, and the settlements there were small and widely separated. Kyle kept up a running commentary, telling the children the names of the geographical features below and making them laugh by describing
adventures of the first intrepid settlers, who had had to contend with “fierce skelly-eyed native beasties,” tsunamis, volcanoes, and now and then certain peculiar eruptions called diatremes.

“But things are fairly calm nowadays except for the occasional ground-rumble,” he reassured them. “Sixth-degree ecological modification lets us grow quite a few Earth crops, and we also have wholesome local veggies thanks to genetic engineering. The most enthusiastic of the hostile critters have been herded off to preserves in uninhabited regions, and the seismic shivers we can’t nip in the bud are mostly predictable well in advance so that they don’t endanger people.”

East of the Lothians the terrain was rolling and more congenial to civilization, obviously longer-settled with larger towns, extensive agricultural areas, and spectacular stretches of rainbow-hued deciduous woodland. The planetary capital of New Glasgow was situated on a great arm of the sea, predictably named the Firth of Clyde; but a small patch of storm clouds unfortunately hid most of the city from view as they passed to the south of the estuary. The writer did point out the verdigris-copper dome of the Caledonian Assembly, Dirigent House, where intrepid old Graeme Hamilton worked to keep his planet of hardheaded Scots toeing the Milieu line, and the University of New Glasgow, a cluster of white stratotowers in the midst of a multicolored campus.

The fertile lowlands along the firth shores were parceled into neatly delineated farms. Some crops were conventionally green, while others were an exotic purple, pale pink, and even orange.

“Full of beta-carotene, the bloinigean-gàraidh,” Kyle remarked about the latter. “Very good for a body. We eat the plant like spinach—in salads or cooked with baconfish.”

“Ick!” Ken grimaced. “I hope there’s Earth food here, too. We had some really foul swill for brekkers. Poached eggs with brown yolks, kippers with the heads still on so you could see the fishies’ ugly little teeth and dead white eyes—and the milk was yellow!”

“That’s because of harmless pigments in the local silage our cows eat,” Kyle said, chuckling. “You’ll get used to it, laddie.”
Or else.

“The food tasted very good,” Dee said quickly. “I just wish I could have had porridge.”

“They’ll have that at the farm, lass. Oats are one Earthside crop that does very well on Caledonia. And barley, too, God-bethankit.”
Or there’d be no lovely malt and I’d die from having to quench my thirst with naught but beer.

To the children’s astonishment, Gran spoke up sharply from the backseat in fluent Gaelic. “ ’S an t-ol a chuir an dùnach ort!”

Grandad shot back a reply in the same language. “Mo nuar! ’S e do bhoidhchead a leòn mi.”

Then the two of them started a fine argle-bargle back and forth that left Ken utterly mystified; but Dee made the translation with ease, eavesdropping on the exchange while pretending to study the masses of islands that clogged the mouth of the firth. Gran Masha had scolded Grandad for drinking, and he had said she was so beautiful it made him sick.

“Save your honeyed flattery,” Masha told her husband in Gaelic. “Both of us know you’re only interested in embalming your brain in alcohol and cooking up feckless conspiracies with your drunken friends. Your thoughts betray you as always.”

“I’m happy you remember the mother tongue I taught you,” Kyle retorted. “But I’ll thank you to stop reading my poor leaking mind and putting your own cruel interpretation on what’s in there. I do what I have to do and do it quite well, thank you.”

“But you don’t! All you write now are political diatribes against the Milieu. You haven’t done a decent piece of fiction for years, and what a pitiful waste of talent it is. You were never a great literary light, but at least you were competent and amusing. Fit for better things than trying to teach creative writing to adolescents and fomenting sedition in your spare time to keep from being bored to death.”

“Abab, you gorgeous hag! I’ve had a bellyful of your bitching. How much more must you shame me before the children?”

“The little girl knows only a few words of the Gaelic, the boy next to nothing. And the shame is your own if you’re still a slave to the drink and still talking treason.”

“If I do tip off a mutchkin from time to time it’s you who’ve driven me to it, Mary my jewel. As for the treason, remember what the Poet said: ‘Freedom and whisky gang thegither!’ You were once sympathetic enough toward the Rebel cause yourself—a worthy daughter to your learned and valiant mother. You’re the one gone astray, lovely creature, not I.”

“Don’t talk nonsense.”

“Is it nonsense that you still care for me?”

“Nar leigeadh Dia!”

“Oh, aye! Then tell me why you’re here with your hair down
and gold rings in your ears and perfume on, dressed to the teeth in that scandalous suit? As if you didn’t know what the sight of you, bonny as the buds of May, would do to me! Ah, Mary, Mary, all that’s needed for my salvation is you, best-beloved, warming my bed and charging my loins and lashing me to creative frenzy again with your luscious forked tongue. And you’re young!
Young!
”