Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (30 page)

“Little Dorrie,” Ian Macdonald said. “Time to go home, my lass.”

And finally smiled.

L
IKE MOST OTHER ORDINARY PEOPLE DURING THOSE IMMEDIATE
post-Proctorship years of the mid-twenty-first century, I had become extremely curious about the Lylmiks’ wonderful artificial world called Concilium Orb and the activities going on inside it. From Orb came the laws and major public policy decisions that shaped the long-term course of human racial destiny … but people like me had no say whatsoever in the process. We did not elect the Human Magnates of the Concilium, much less the exotic magnates who greatly outnumbered them. The whole crowd was appointed by the Lylmik, and ordinary citizens—operant and non—knew very little about Conciliar operations.

No official policy of secrecy prevailed. There were plaque-books and Tri-D documentaries galore that seemed to describe in detail the way that the central galactic government functioned. Everyone knew that magnates were individually skimmed from the crème de la crème of human operants by the Lylmik Supervisory Quincunx itself, those five demigodly paragons of wisdom and virtue. Magnates conducted their Conciliar business mentally, with open minds. It was therefore supposedly impossible for them to lie, dissemble, or otherwise betray the public trust.

Human and exotic magnates went to Orb about once every 334 Earth days to participate in plenary Concilium sessions. Magnates also attended single-Polity sessions and committee and Directorate meetings whenever these were deemed necessary.

No law held that the deliberations of the magnates were secret. Nevertheless, human news-gathering organizations were barred from having offices in Orb or otherwise attempting to
cover the Concilium proceedings in any systematic way. Sympathetic human magnates (especially those belonging to the Rebel faction) leaked the occasional piece of hot poop, and privileged visitors, nonoperant human service employees who worked in the Orb enclaves, and even friendly exotics spilled what beans they could. But most news from Orb consisted of canned material disseminated from the Information Directorate of the Human Polity.

Humanity was unique in fretting over a star-chamber Concilium. The other five Milieu races, secure in a tranquil Unified state that seemed to preclude outright contention or even serious dispute (making it automatically suspect to free-spirited Earthlings), would never have dreamed of questioning the activities of their magnates. The perseverant bumptiousness of humans struck them as strange, immature, and disquieting.

More than once the very admission of humanity into the Milieu was called into question by the other races; but the almighty Lylmik had insisted that our acceptance was necessary. They had gone to ingenious lengths to bring us into the confederation in the first place, and as time passed and the Metapsychic Rebellion seemed more and more inevitable, they used means both fair and foul to prevent us from getting chucked out. Only in hindsight can we understand why.

Since the entity reading these memoirs (like all too many busy people) may not have been a keen student of Milieu governmental structure, I will do a fast overview in the hope of rendering this account of mine a trifle less opaque. Those who are already familiar with it may want to skip ahead directly to the raunchy bits and the violence.

The thousands of individual planets of the Galactic Milieu are not governed on a day-to-day basis by the Concilium, but by republican Intendant Assemblies made up of elected representatives of the populace. On human worlds, the Intendant Associates include both metapsychic operants and nonoperants, and the legislation they debate and decide upon encompasses most of the nuts and bolts of local planetary law and has minimal impact upon the vaster tapestry of interstellar civilization. Intendant Assemblies may discuss high matters of public policy, but only in order to pass recommendations on to the Planetary Dirigent, the highest authority and ultimate local arbiter on each world, who in turn may forward the matter to the Concilium.

The Dirigent, who is always an extremely powerful operant
and an influential magnate, is appointed by the Lylmik. She—or more rarely he, for human females have shown a special talent for this arduous job—serves as the principal channel for Milieu policy on each planet and guardian of the Milieu’s rights. She may summarily and even secretly overrule any action of the local Assembly deemed contrary to the best interests of the confederation.

Oddly, the Dirigent is also required to act as a World Ombudsman. The most humble nonoperant citizen may petition Dirigent House and have a point of law adjudicated on the spot if simple justice seems to demand it. Most often, petitioners are directed by the Dirigent’s staff to the appropriate government officer having the authority to deal with their problem. But on rare occasions (as I myself can testify), the Dirigent may personally intervene, with the result that all hell breaks loose and heads—even those of the most exalted and Magnified kind—may threaten to roll.

Some Diligents are revered and even loved by their constituents. Greater numbers are feared, despised, or endured as a necessary evil.

The Concilium is the principal executive, legislative, and judicial body of what is officially termed the Coadunate Galactic Milieu, a federation consisting at the present time of six racial Polities having significant numbers of metapsychic operants among their population. Magnates of the Concilium are presumably selected from among the most exceptional minds of their Polity—although some of the human contingent strike one as odd choices indeed. They are all operants and may come from any walk of life, including their planet’s Intendant Assembly. While some magnates are full-time bureaucrats, the majority devote only part of their time to the Concilium and work at other occupations as well. Magnates serve terms of indefinite length, according to the whim of the Lylmik. Unlike the Planetary Dirigent appointees, who are required to accept the office whether they want it or not, magnates-designate may decline the honor if they feel they do not wish to serve in the Concilium.

When the Human Polity was first enfranchised, the membership of the Concilium was as follows:

Human representation grew steadily as we pulled our act together, until there were nearly 400 humans serving on the Concilium around the time of the Metapsychic Rebellion in 2083.

One doesn’t simply drop in at the legislative center of the galaxy as part of a grand tour. Concilium Orb is strictly off limits to casual travelers, with only the magnates of the six Polities and their immediate families and administrative staff permitted unlimited access. (Humanity’s unique cultural requirement for living, not robotic, service workers has been accommodated by hiring nonoperant personnel for limited terms of employment and restricting them to the human enclaves most of the time.) Other citizens of the Milieu may come to Orb only when invited by a magnate, and even then only on very special occasions.

I would have been eligible, along with Denis and Lucille and the Remillard Dynasty spouses and children, to attend the inaugural session in 2052, when the founding magnates of the Human Polity first took their Concilium seats. Unfortunately, I was unavailable at the time, being on the lam in the British Columbia wilderness abetting the felonious pregnancy of the Human First Magnate’s late wife.

The next opportunity for me to visit Orb did not take place until the unforgettable session of 2063, when my great-grandnephew Marc Remillard became a magnate and a galactic celebrity to be reckoned with in one fell swoop, and when the world-class randan between Paul Remillard and Rory Muldowney marred (or enhanced, depending upon one’s point of view) the festivities at the Poltroyans’ party.

On that occasion I happened to travel to Orb on the CSS Skykomish River, the same starship that carried Marc’s four young operant friends Alexis Manion, Guy Laroche, Peter Dalembert, and Shigeru Morita. Like me, they had been invited to be Marc’s honored guests at his accession to the Concilium.

I was already fairly well acquainted with these worthies, who frequented my bookshop in Hanover, New Hampshire, and called me Uncle Rogi, as most of my customers did. They were
all around Marc’s age, all outstanding minds, and all destined to become magnates themselves someday. Manion, Dalembert, and Laroche were Hanover natives who had attended Brebeuf Academy along with Marc, and they had known one another since early boyhood. Shig Morita had joined the gang when they all roomed together at the Mu Psi Omega operant fraternity at Dartmouth College.

Alexis Manion was Marc’s best friend in his younger years, and I had once enjoyed a brief affair with his widowed mother, Perdita, when she worked in my bookshop. During the Metapsychic Rebellion, Alex was Marc’s closest advisor and confidant; and if Cloud and Hagen are to be believed, he also became Marc’s most implacable enemy long after the Rebellion ended … or aeons before it began, if you want to be nitpicky.

Like Marc, Manion was a towering genius with an IQ classed as “unmeasurable.” His field of expertise was dynamic-field research, and he became an authority on the relationship of the mental lattices to the Larger Reality. Manion did his postdoc work at Princeton in New Jersey but spent most of his mature years on the faculty of the IDFS at Cambridge, England, where he was a colleague of the famous Annushka Gawrys. In 2080 he was on the short list for the Nobel Prize in physics when his denunciation of Unity and public conversion to the Rebellion put him beyond the pale.

Alex possessed grandmasterclass creativity, masterly coercion and PK, and adequate farsensing. He was a rather awkward individual physically, of medium height, with a jaw like a concrete block. An air of preoccupation gave his rugged features an incongruously dreamy look. Alex had a fine light baritone voice and was especially fond of Gilbert and Sullivan. He was much more contemplative than Marc, resisting nomination to the Concilium for ten years until irresistible pressure was put on him by his peers at IDFS.

Guy “Boom-Boom” Laroche had much the same blue-collar Franco-American heritage as the ancestral Remillards and seemed less of an egghead than Marc’s other close friends. He was a powerfully built young man, an enthusiastic skier, fisherman, and skirt-chaser, who favored T-shirts even in winter so that he could show off his gorgeous pecs and 55-cent biceps. The face topping that magnificent body was so ugly it was splendid—joli-laid, as we Froggies express it. In later life he had himself resculpted into more conventional handsomeness, but I’ll always remember him as he was in his youth. When Boom-Boom
grinned with his pearly whites, flummoxed with his long eyelashes, and let loose a blast of winning metacoercivity, strong men would trust him with their lives and strong women would go gooey as chocolate éclairs. Piss Boom-Boom off, on the other hand, and you either got out of town at escape velocity or ended up knitting your bones in a regen-tank.

Laroche’s only grandmasterly functions were creativity and coercion. He studied Milieu jurisprudence and law enforcement, and in 2063, fresh out of college, he was an inspector-intern for the New England Zone Police. In time he joined the Human Division of the Galactic Magistratum, where he quickly made his mark and was appointed to the Concilium. He was in line for the top cop position and would undoubtedly have become Human Evaluator General had not circumstances led him in a completely different direction.

Peter Paul Dalembert, Jr., was the great-grandson of the late Glenn Dalembert and Colette Roy, both of whom had been part of Denis Remillard’s original “coterie” at Dartmouth long before the Great Intervention. His father, Peter Paul, Sr., became the Chief Executive Officer of Remco Industries when Philip Remillard retired from the family business to become a Magnate of the Concilium and head of the Human Commerce Directorate. Young Pete’s Aunt Aurelie married Philip, and his late Aunt Jeanne was Maurice Remillard’s first wife.

Pete was one of those hyper little guys who had his life organized down to the last byte. When he and Marc and Alex and Boom-Boom were kids, it was always Pete who took care of the logistic details for their fishing and camping trips, or rustled up the makings for the outrageous gadgets they built, or knew how to manipulate the system and do a fix whenever one of them got into trouble. Another creator-coercer, Pete was probably the most skillful bullshit artist I have ever known. Women thought he was sensitive and adorable. He studied computer science at Dartmouth and took an MBA at the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration. Pete Dalembert might have become a hotshot executive just like his father if Marc had not convinced him early on to apply his talents elsewhere.

Shigeru Morita was born in Japan and educated at Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, and Cambridge. His metapsychic talents included grandmasterclass redaction and creativity. He was a quiet, scholarly youth who grew up to be an outstanding biophysicist, and his hobbies included piano jazz and fly-tying. In person, Shig was slyly witty, modest, and seemingly unaware that he
was very good-looking. His area of professional interest was the microanatomy and electrochemical functioning of the human brain, and he shared Marc’s and Alex’s interest in cerebroenergetic enhancement.

It was Shig Morita who eventually demonstrated how the infamous Mental Man project might progress from theory to practical application. Without his assistance, Marc would never have become the leader of the Rebellion, never brought about the deaths of four billion people, and never metamorphosed into my Family Ghost.