Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (47 page)

They went downstairs together after sending the baggage to the pad on the goods conveyor. Masha, looking more gorgeous than ever, and Kyle, seeming to be younger than his own son,
were having tea in the front parlor with Ian. Janet came in from the direction of the kitchen, carrying a basket.

“Well, better late than never,” drawled the domestic manager. “You kids got all your stuff together?”

“Yes’m,” said Ken. “Down at pad level ready to be put in the egg.”

“Good. Your Grampaw and Gramma don’t fancy sitting down to eat. They want to get started for Clyde right away. Seems the both of ’em are going back to Earth with you, and Gramps has to rush through some business if he’s to make it. I packed a picnic lunch for you to eat aloft. Ken, you can carry it.” She shook hands with the boy, then handed him the covered basket. “Hasta luego, muchacho. And good luck. I think you’re gonna need it.”

Janet turned to Dee and pumped her hand. “So long, Doro. Sorry we didn’t get along better. My fault, I think. Come back when you’re older and maybe we’ll give it another shot.” She grinned at Masha and Kyle. “Lots of things to get done around here. Be seeing you.” And she was gone.

“What an amazing woman,” murmured the professor, setting down her teacup.

Kyle snorted. “You could almost suspect there was a heart under that barbed-wire brassiere.”

“There is,” said Ian shortly. “Ken, Dorrie, get your coats and things.”

They obeyed. Then they all made their way down to the pad exit. Kyle and Ian loaded the baggage into the egg. It was snowing harder. The pad was wet but clear, with the melting grid now programmed for automatic winter mode.

After Ian said goodbye to his parents, he turned to the children. Ken, who was thirteen, was relieved to be offered a handshake. But Ian kissed his daughter on the forehead. His eyes were wet as he said, “I’ll take care of the oak tree while you’re gone.” Then he put both children into the egg and slammed the door.

The Porsche took off in free flight.

With her farsight, Dee saw her father go back into the hillside door. He took a mole-car to the house lift and ascended to the second level, where his bedroom was. Janet was waiting for him there with some of the little greenish-pink popspheres that held airplant essence, and so Dee stopped watching.

I
FIRST MET HER IN THE
M
ARCH OF
2069,
WHEN SHE WAS TWELVE.
It was late afternoon on a dark, blustery day in New Hampshire that had the Dartmouth College students and Hanover townsfolk scuttling anxiously about, bundled to the eyeballs in anticipation of one of our notorious spring blizzards. The little bell mounted on the door of my bookshop jingled and in came a solemn-faced waif wearing a scarlet enviro parka and a knitted white cloche. The place was understandably empty. I had been sitting with my feet up before the working antique woodstove I had recently installed in the readers’ nook, perusing a classic issue of
Unknown Worlds.
My cat, Marcel LaPlume VI, was asleep on the rag rug under the footstool.

“Good afternoon,” the child said, looking around at the shelves of paged books somewhat apprehensively. From her small stature, I had judged her to be nine or ten, but the mature inflection of her voice suggested she might be three or four years older. I was half asleep and didn’t immediately notice that she was an operant. “I’m looking for something special. For a gift.”

I was not going to disturb my carefully arranged old bones for a mere slip of a girl who might have mistaken my specialty bookshop for the local plaque dispensary. “I sell mostly rare science fiction and fantasy books dating from the twentieth century. Collector’s items.”

“I know. I’d like to find a birthday present for my brother. He’s turning into a rather keen bibliophile. You may remember his coming into your shop a few times. Kenneth Macdonald.”

I woke up at that, and so did my cat. Marcel lifted his graymaned
head, stared at the girl with interest, and decided she was ripe for his scam. He began broadcasting strong telepathic requests for food.

She was a meta, and a powerful one from what little I could discern of her “social” aspect. Her reference to her brother and her slight Scottish accent let me place her: Dorothea Macdonald, the prodigy from the planet Caledonia who’d entered Catherine Remillard’s Preceptorial Institute last fall.

There had been a brief flutter in the operant community about her at the time, but the little girl had stayed out of the limelight since then. Naturally the Remillard Dynasty was extremely interested in the newcomer, and all of them found excuses to visit Cat’s place from time to time to check out the wiz-kid and keep abreast of her progress. Only Denis, Lucille, and Jack had exercised decent restraint and respected the poor child’s privacy. Marc, hard at work on the other side of the continent when he wasn’t off among the stars, ignored her completely. I had gleaned from family scuttlebutt that the girl was a potential paramount, if she could only manage to overcome some serious inhibitions that still kept portions of her creativity, redactive power, and coercivity latent.

“Any book in particular you’re interested in?” I asked.

The enfant formidable had an unassuming and winsome manner and she obviously liked cats. She pulled off her gloves and took a packet of potato chips out of her pocket. “These crisps are barbecue-flavored. Do you think Marcel would like some?”

Yes!
said my furbearing gourmand, cantering over to her with slavering chops.
I love you!

She hunkered down and opened the snack-pack. Marcel’s first eager chomp nearly took her fingers and she wisely decided to scatter the chips on the floor for him.

I lurched upright, cracked a few joints that had developed mild rheumatiz, and restored the valuable old magazine to its protective envelope. The long-haired lunchbucket gobbled away, uttering telepathic sighs of appreciation. The only thing he loved better than potato chips was canned sweet corn.

“You’ve made a friend for life there, young lady,” I said, “and you’ll probably regret it. That beast is the worst food cadger in northern New England.”

She looked up at me. Her hazel eyes were a bit too closely set but fringed with attractive dark lashes. No one would have called her pretty, and yet she had a gamine charm that had nothing
to do with the coercive power she almost, but not quite, managed to conceal behind her mind-screen.

“The only pets I ever had were larger, outdoor animals—a horse and a bull.” She stroked the cat’s head and emptied out the last of the chips. Marcel was scarfing them down like a starving thing in spite of the fact that he’d eaten most of the nuked macaroni and cheese that had been my midday meal. “Cats are wonderful creatures, aren’t they? So telepathically responsive.”

I reallyreallyreally love you
, Marcel said to her.
More food in pocket?

Gently, she removed his huge furry paws from her lap and got to her feet. “Sorry, boy. You’ve eaten it all.”

“He hogs the blankets in cold weather and sheds like a molting bison when it’s warm,” said I. “But I keep him around to control the mice and spider population.” Thrusting forth my hand, I introduced myself. “Everyone in town calls me Uncle Rogi, so you might as well, too.”

“My name is Dorothea Macdonald.” She gave a tiny shrug. “People have given me all kinds of nicknames, but I don’t much care for any of them.”

“H’mm.” I cogitated for a moment. “May I call you Dorothée? It’s the Franco equivalent of your name. Comes off the tongue more trippingly, n’est-ce pas?”

She brightened. “Yes. I like it.”

“Well. Now that’s settled, let’s talk about books. How much do you want to spend? Not all antiquarian books are priced sky-high, but some are. I hope your brother’s not a collector of early Stephen King firsts.”

“Oh, no. He likes older fantasy and horror. The fifties and before. I can’t spend more than about twenty-five dollars.”

I went striding into the M section, plucked a shrink-wrapped volume from the shelf, and handed it to her. “How about this?
The Rival Monster
by Sir Compton MacKenzie, in the Clarke Irwin Canadian edition. It’s a humorous piece about the Loch Ness monster being hit by a flying saucer.”

She burst out laughing. “Kenny should love it.”

“Only fifteen bux. A steal for a Very Good copy. I’ll throw in a plass bibilope your brother can keep it in. Prevents the old high-sulfur-content paper from deteriorating any further. Tell him to turn the pages carefully.”

We went to the desk to complete the transaction, followed by Marcel, who still hadn’t abandoned hope. Her credit card had been issued by the Bank of Caledonia.

“You’re a long way from home,” I remarked. “How do you like the Old World?”

“I lived here from the time I was a baby until I was five,” she said, after a brief pause to sweep my mental vestibulum for traces of senile overfamiliarity. As usual when I was tending the shop, I hadn’t even bothered to put my screen up and I was readily classified as a harmless old coot with no motive other than commercial bonhomie for questioning her.

“But I hardly remember anything about my early life on Earth,” she went on. “Our home was in Edinburgh, Scotland. It’s very different in North America. Especially … here.”

“And a far cry from Caledonia, I betcha.”

She eyed me in silence for a moment. Then: “You know who I am, don’t you.” It was a flat statement.

I nodded, handing back her card, and indicated a boxlike gadget I had recently acquired for the business. “Would you like some free instant gift wrap? This machine here can do anything from ecosensitive to high camp.”

For the first time, the corners of her lips turned up in a hint of mischief. “Can you make it really weird?”

I put the book inside the dojigger, selected the
BAD TASTE—MILD
option, and hit the pad. A few moments later the finished present plopped out: screaming orange paper imprinted with motifs from
Bambi Meets Godzilla
, all tied up with a glittering cerise ribbon. Dorothée was delighted.

Outside, the sky had started to spit snow pellets, those horrible little white bits like micro-popcorn that sting the face so badly when the wind is strong. I asked the girl if she would like to wait in the shop for a while and have a cup of cocoa by the fire until the nasty stuff either stopped or turned into honest snow.

Again I felt the brief touch of her prudent mental scrutiny, affirming that I was only a Kindly Geezer rather than a Dirty Old Man. She accepted my invitation—and at that point our long friendship began.

Marcel, purring like an outboard motor, sat happily on her lap as we chatted, and by the time she left, nearly an hour later, I had learned a fair amount about her background and she had cleverly extracted from me information about the Remillard family that I was not accustomed to share with casual acquaintances.

In the three years that followed, Dorothée came to The Eloquent Page every other week or so. At first she feigned an interest in
my wares, but finally she admitted that she just liked to talk to me. She needed an adult operant with no axe to grind as a confidant, and none of the personnel at the Preceptorial Institute filled the bill. Neither did her grandmother Masha, who had taken a Visiting Professorship at Dartmouth’s Department of Metapsychology in order to remain close to the girl and her brother. The professor and her husband, the subversive comic novelist Kyle Macdonald—my ancient drinking buddy, as you may recall—had made a nice home for the children in a rented house on the south side of Hanover. But neither Masha nor Kyle were types who invited childish trust. I apparently am, as any attentive reader of these memoirs may have deduced, and it has got me into a peck of trouble for my pains.

But what the hell.

At that time in my life things were tranquil enough. The bookshop was almost profitable, I was having a protracted no-strings affair with a delicious sloe-eyed librarian named Surya Gupta who worked at the Public Database around the corner, and the Remillard family members were engrossed in their own arcane machinations and not in need of a cantankerous but sympathetic father figure. Little Dorothée was.

So I got to hear blow-by-blow accounts of her painful progress from suboperant to adept metapsychic, and from masterclass operant to Grand Master Farsensor, Creator, Coercer, Redactor, and Psychokinetic. The ultimate accolade of paramount status waited in the wings, dependent upon her rooting out the last of the inhibiting dross in her unconscious and activating the full potential of her mind. Besides lending a sympathetic ear to stories of her travails at the Institute, I made sure she learned the civilized behavior patterns and important bits of “metiquette” that kids raised in operant homes take for granted.

Dorothée was Cat Remillard’s star pupil, and at the same time she acquired an education in our local ivy-clad halls of academe, majoring in higher mathematics and theoretical physics. Her hobbies were birdwatching (of which more anon), skiing, and hiking. She also enjoyed sewing her own clothes and creating jewelry, grinding the gemstones and doing the metalwork, too. Her favorite piece was a reproduction, in white gold and the relatively inexpensive diamonds of Caledonia, sent to her by her father, of a piece of costume jewelry she had cherished as a young child. She wore the small diamond-studded domino mask on a thin chain around her neck as a good-luck charm.

Dorothée sometimes came to the bookshop with her brother,
a pleasantly nerdish youth two years her senior, who was also in training at the Preceptorial Institute. I let Ken Macdonald use my database to hunt inexpensive collectible fantasy books in return for his doing chores such as packing mail orders and cleaning up the cat latrine. (I was never able to train this particular Marcel to use modern kitty sanitary facilities. He demanded, and got, a sandbox.) Ken had chosen to major in metapsychology. It bothered him not a whit that his mindpowers weren’t as phenomenal as those of his baby sister.