Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (31 page)

The CSS Skykomish River had a df of 180, which was a whole lot brisker than I liked, but by scarfing anodyne pills and lubricating myself with frequent coups de gnole in between hops I kept discomfort at bay. My well-basted condition had an additional advantage. When Marc’s four buddies judged that I was safely hors de combat from overindulgence, they did not bother to screen me out when I happened to be in a position to overhear their telepathic bull sessions. The ship’s swimming pool, solarium, gym, and garden-bar provided me with many a diverting hour’s worth of entertainment as I pretended to nap with a Wild Turkey highball close at hand, all the while secretly eavesdropping on what the metapsychic Jeunesse Dorée—including Marc himself—was getting up to. A lot of their conversations involved sex, with Boom-Boom and Pete regaling their comrades with the number of notches added to the handles of their six-shooters, while Shig and Alex stressed quality over quantity.

And then there was the sex life of their glorious leader …

At this period in his life, Marc was still fairly close to me, sharing accounts of his running battles with the Dartmouth trustees and his squabbles with Paul, who kept trying unsuccessfully to steer his oldest son into more politically acceptable areas of research and away from left-wing Dynasty members such as his Uncle Severin and Uncle Adrien.

But even though Marc kept me informed about his work, he was reticent about his private affairs. Far from being a loner, he attended parties, dances, and other social events regularly, often squiring lively females of high metapsychic quotient. As far as I knew, he had never had any deep romantic involvement with any of them, but I had naturally assumed that the invincible Franco hormones had done their stuff.

I assumed wrong.

My eavesdropping during that voyage revealed that Marc was
still a technical virgin at the age of twenty-five and intended to remain so indefinitely. He had told his incredulous friends that he considered sexual activity a monumental waste of time and energy that dulled the mind’s keen edge.

I suppose I should not have been so surprised. I was a rather late bloomer myself, and Denis had told me years ago that he probably would have remained celibate if his eyes had not been opened to his “procreational duty” by an old mentor. Sex being the ultimate in addictive behavior, Denis had gone on to fulfill his obligations with zest, siring the seven stalwarts of the Dynasty and writing, together with his wife Lucille, a brief but cogent monograph on the sexology of operants. (I was a bit disappointed not to be credited as the pioneer of doing it in mid-air.)

Denis’s most brilliant offspring, Paul, had also been sexually inhibited until the grand-opera superstar Teresa Kendall ignited his passion. When their love died, Paul seemed to compensate by fucking every presentable operant woman in sight until he settled into a stable liaison with Laura Tremblay. The fact that she was already married to an Irish magnate named Rory Muldowney, later the Planetary Dirigent of Hibernia, seemed not to bother either of them. Poor old Rory apparently bore his cuckoldry with old-fashioned complaisance. After Laura’s strange death, Paul played the field again, ultimately siring thirty-eight natural children in addition to Marc, Marie, Madeleine, Luc, and Jack.

When Marc was very young he told me about his impatience with what he called “the inherent limitations of the human body.” Puberty was a considerable shock, but he claimed that he had found ways to conquer the worst of the distractions inherent in being an inefficiently engineered male human.

I had tried to talk some sense into him, had told him that it was dangerous to mess with hormones and other precious bodily fluids, had even warned him that human nature was likely to nail him in the end no matter how successfully he thought he had repressed it. But he only gave me that maddening one-sided smile of his and suggested that I mind my own business and get my own ashes hauled whenever necessary. I knew all too well what his abhorrence of his father’s promiscuity must have done to his unconscious mind, but I could not believe that he was genuinely asexual.

When the right woman came around, I reassured myself, Marc would happily discover that he was human after all.

As it happened, the wrongest woman possible would shortly prove me mistaken, and Marc would have to wait seventeen more years for the redemptive love of the right one to cancel out the effects of the disaster.

Marc had described Orb to me and so had his sister Marie and his brother Luc. All three of them had served as pages and junior administrative assistants either for their father or for their Aunt Anne during their adolescence, earning poli-sci college credits as they performed what was basically prestigious dog-work during the weeks the Concilium was in session. The best kind of Orbicular fun was to be had after office hours, they told me, exploring or participating in the recreational opportunities of the hundreds of residential enclaves of the planetoid where the six racial groups were housed in clever simulations of their home environments. There were thirty-two different human enclaves alone; and this session, for the first time, a Lylmik enclave would be open to visitors. We would also be able to attend some of the Concilium sessions—including the all-important seating of the new magnates and the appointment of the new Diligents—watching the proceedings from the visitors’ gallery.

Most of the operant passengers on the CSS Skykomish River, myself included, crowded into the eight big observation lounges in order to catch a first eyeball glimpse of Orb and its unusual star, Telonis. Stupidly, I had decided to forgo the pills and the booze during this final passage from hyperspace into the vicinity of the artificial world so as not to miss anything. The abrupt
zang-zung
of the translation through the superficies felt like someone had hammered a couple of ninepenny nails through the top of my skull. Manfully, I refrained from howling out loud. Since my mind-screen is the only reliably powerful metafaculty I possess, I thought I could shriek all I pleased inside my head without making a spectacle of myself, but I must have shown some physical indication of distress perceptible to a keen redactor, because Shig Morita put a solicitous hand on my shoulder.

“Are you all right, Uncle Rogi?”

The other three young men came over and hovered about me in the dimly lit observation chamber, looking anxious.

“Course I’m all right,” I grumped. “Just a little twinge caught me by surprise there.”

“At your age, you really should use anodyne pills,” Alex
Manion reproved me. “Or better yet, a knockout minidose for big hops like these.”

The damn kid had never forgiven me for boffing his mom. “I’m only a hundred and seventeen, and I’ve got the same immortality genes as the rest of the Remillards, and I’m doing just fine. Quit treating me like a basket case.” Boom-Boom’s bulk was blocking my view of the Telonis system so I shouldered past him, not wanting to miss what was said to be one of the scenic wonders of our galaxy.

But where was Orb and its star?

The sickmaking void of the gray limbo had given way to the usual jewel-strewn black velvet of deep space, but there was no sun to be seen and no planetoid, either. I wasn’t much of an interstellar traveler in those days but I’d already gone to the cosmop worlds of Avalon and Okanagon, the planet Assawompsett (originally ethnic “American” but now grown so populous and important that it had been recently reclassified cosmopolitan), the lovely “Japanese” world Ezo, and the inadvertently euonymous “French” planet of Blois. Like almost all of the worlds explored by Milieu scientists ages ago and designated suitable for human habitation, they were warmed by G-type yellow suns. I had known that Orb’s sun Telonis was a peculiar dwarf, but nothing prepared me for the stellar object that Alex Manion now pointed out.

It seemed at first to be just another bright pinpoint star, presumably many lightyears distant. But as my eyes accommodated to the darkness and the window’s polarization I saw that Telonis was golden, not pure white, and certainly close by, for I could perceive that its tiny disk was fringed by orange and red prominences that rippled with languid slowness, like the pseudopods of some fiery microorganism. A luminous double corona surrounded the dwarf sun. The inner halo was diminutive and pearl-colored, consisting of spiky rays at either pole that curved and eventually blended into a filmy donut-shaped gas cloud about the equatorial plane. More striking was an immense, very faint, almost perfectly spherical nebula that nearly filled the area of sky visible through the huge viewport. The glowing gas was mostly green, but there were dim filaments and diaphanous patches of crimson, violet, and blue as well. I can compare the vision only to a huge broken bubble of frozen, iridescent smoke with the ornately coiffured miniature sun at its center. The longer I stared at the stellar anomaly, the brighter and more beautiful it seemed.

“My God,” Shig Morita whispered. “What is it? Surely the Lylmik wouldn’t have built their artificial world in a T Tauri system—”

“It’s not a T Tauri,” said Alex Manion. “It’s been fairly stable for at least six million years. It’s a conventional white dwarf star that the Lylmik meddled with. An artifact.”

The others uttered awed obscenities. I, not having the least notion what Shig and Alex had been talking about, asked the obvious question. “But why did the Lylmik do it? And how?”

“Apparently,” Alex said, “they tinkered with this sun just to make it pretty. No one is sure how they managed it, not even the Krondaku, but Marc and I have been working on a theory that I won’t bore you with now. Telonis itself is smaller than Earth. The radius of the outer sphere of nebulosity is roughly five hundred million kloms. Orb is the only planetary body in the system, another A.U. or so further out … and we’re almost on top of it.”

I strained my eyes—and sure enough, occulting the marvelous star-spangled colored veil near the bottom of the window was a fast-swelling circle of dead black. As we drew nearer it was transformed into the familiar dark sphere depicted in every schoolchild’s first book-plaque about the Galactic Milieu. Concilium Orb is about 500 kilometers in diameter, sparsely dotted with points of light. We swooped in smoothly toward one of them, which turned out to be the colossal entry portal of the Human Terminal. Our ship entered at a good rate of knots and we docked with a minimum of fuss and disembarked at the most important place in the Milky Way Galaxy.

Marc was waiting for us, wearing his old green Rangeley parka, jeans, and Bean boots, looking as sardonic and debonair as the Devil himself. Standing at his side was one of the most gorgeous women I have ever seen in my life. She was nearly as tall as Marc, with a marvelous long neck emphasized by her upswept hairstyle and scarlet polo jersey. Raven curls sprang like a dark fountain from an ornamental clasp at the crown of her head and fell nearly to her shoulders. The skin of her face was utterly flawless, the color of milk, making a startling contrast to jet-black brows and lashes and wide-set eyes of electrifying blue. A faint, charming dimple graced her chin, and her full lips were tinted a glossy coral pink. Her body in its simple black-and-white ski suit was that of a mannequin, willowy rather than voluptuous.

This exquisite creature projected no sexually provocative vibes at all and her mind was hedged about by a grandmasterclass shield. Nevertheless I felt the hairs at the back of my neck prickle and my blood pound as I goggled at her shamelessly, my three-piece set roused from torpor to a most embarrassing bandaison. Tonnerre de dieu, but she was magnificent!

 … But why was my understandable surge of lustful admiration somehow tainted with aversion?

The goddess was having an effect upon my four young companions as well. You could almost smell the surging testosterone and hear the frantic slamming of mental barriers. Marc did not seem to notice as he presented us formally to her, and then introduced her to us.

“Citizen Lynelle Rogers is from Okanagon. She’s a special assistant to that planet’s Dirigent-Designate, and she has very kindly found time to help me out of a very tough spot. Be grateful to her.”

The marvelous Lynelle lowered her dusky eyelids. “It’s nothing at all, Marc. It would have been such a shame to disappoint your friends and your Uncle Rogi.”

The five of us grinned like apes.

“Let’s all get on the tube,” Marc said, “and I’ll explain as we ride. Your bags are being sent on ahead.”

“This way,” Citizen Rogers said sweetly. She and Marc led us onto the correct terminal walkway, and the conversation continued in colloquial farspeech.

Marc said: I ordered my accommodation here on Orb months ago, when I first received my nomination, and I specified the Alpenland enclave so we could all enjoy some winter sports when you came as my guests. Unfortunately, I got totally wrapped up in my CE work at Dartmouth because I wanted to have a working model of the E15 ready to bring with me to Orb. I left the finalization of the accommodation details to a departmental secretary—and he goofed. When I arrived here in Orb with Marie and Luc and Jack last week, I discovered that I’d been assigned a chintzy little A-frame chalet that slept only one. And the billeting flunkies claimed there was no larger place available anywhere in Alpenland.

Lynelle Rogers said: This Concilium session marks the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Great Intervention on Earth. Over a hundred new human magnates have just been appointed. Most of them have brought along numbers of invited guests as well as
operant staff members. The result is that facilities in the human enclaves are strained to the bursting point.

Marc’s mind-tone was wry: We can blame Lylmik absentmindedness for not anticipating a crush. They’ve promised to triple the amount of human-enclave accommodation by next session—but that’s no help now. I cast around among the other family members and got my three sibs beds in Papa’s big apartment, but only Uncle Phil and Aunt Aurelie had any extra room for you. Somehow, I didn’t think you’d appreciate bunking with their teenage kids over in Paliuli.

Lynelle flashed a radiant smile over her shoulder as we got off the moving walkway and went into the tube station. She said: Paliuli enclave is ever so twee if you like sunny tropical beaches jammed with boogie-boarding children. And slack-key guitar music coming out of the hibiscus bushes. And hordes of middle-aged Russian magnates sitting under coconut trees sipping Mai-Tais and banana daiquiris.