Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (59 page)

It was easier that time, wasn’t it?

Last of all, Hydra took Dee’s mother.

Not my Mummie no no please …

Her most especially. Ready? Begin.

For the third time Dee knew that incredible pain, inflicted deliberately by the Hydra to enhance its own pleasure and for another reason as well.

Why did you kill them that way WHY you filthy misbegotten thing?

But the monster only said:
Find your own food!

Find your own anger. Find your own pain.

Oh Mum no. I did love you. I’m sorry I was so angry. You thought the therapy would do me good. You thought the pain would be worthwhile if it made me operant. I didn’t understand then. I really would have saved you if I could. But I was too young too weak too selfish too unaware—

Pain unending. Not for the three victims but for her.

It wasn’t my fault that you suffered! It was Hydra’s fault and Fury’s. I couldn’t stop them!

Liar.

Pain.

Hydra laughed at her and her tardy pilgrimage, and as it laughed its monstrous form changed and divided and it became four human beings. One woman was a dark-haired, scarlet-lipped beauty, the other a frail-looking blonde with the glint of madness in her eyes. The taller of the two men smiled like a satisfied cat that had consumed its prey. His brawny companion was the young “father” who had besought Dee’s help at the Spouting Horn.

I know who you are!
Dee cried. I
know you’re here on this island hoping for a chance to destroy me. BUT I’M NOT A HELPLESS CHILD ANYMORE. Go ahead! Try to feed. See what will happen!

She showed them. And in the dream-vision, pain turned against the paingivers.

The Hydra faces screamed soundlessly, together with Dorothea Macdonald. She saw them squirming, dying, and was filled with joy.

Abruptly the four Hydra-units became motionless, like holoforms in a frozen Tri-D display. “John Quentin” lost his solidity,
turned to a wraith, and faded to nothingness. Yes, of course. He was already dead. Safe from her, damn him! But not the others …

COME AFTER ME HYDRA COME SO I CAN KILL YOU EVEN MORE PAINFULLY THAN YOU KILLED MY MOTHER!

The Hydra survivors in her dream returned to life. Linking hands, they howled at her in a metaconcert of pure hate.
Too late! You should have done it the first time. Coward! Hypocrite!

They vanished.

Joy vanished as well, and with it the beginnings of an awful understanding.

Dee came to her senses, alone in the dank reality of the cave, standing in water up to her ankles. The tide had turned and the sea was streaming slowly into the Geodh Ghille Mhóire. The memorecall of the old traumatic experience was dim, confused, troubling. There had been no catharsis. She inspected the innermost portions of her mind with redactive scrutiny and discovered that the deep mental inhibitions were still in place. Reliving the old nightmare had apparently accomplished nothing.

A few gulls wheeled overhead, their melancholy cries echoing from the walls of the chasm. She wanted to shout her disappointment and anger to the soaring birds. Somehow she had managed to bungle the initial part of her healing journey. Understanding had slipped away from her at the last moment—or else she had let it escape.

Very well. She’d try again.

But not immediately. There was no real danger in the rising tide, but she would have to leave the cave at once. The high-water mark on the wall was above her head. She went splashing out, using her stick, and climbed onto dry rocks above the inundated bench. The sea was still nearly calm, heaving gently up and down as she began the ascent of the blocky “steps” leading to the moorland above the cliffs.

Now the cave would be inaccessible for nearly twelve hours, and to start over at the beginning she would have to wait until long after nightfall for the next low tide. She could see in the dark, of course, but that required continuing mental effort that would seriously detract from the experience.

“Damn!” she said as she reached the chasm’s top. “What am I going to do?”

A wry female voice seemed to say: First you try dry out da boots an’ socks, eh?

Dee had to laugh, and bent her creativity to the task. Then she
made the only possible decision. She would ignore her apparent failure and proceed along the north-shore path as she had originally planned, retracing the route she and her family had taken on the fatal hike. Whatever happened would happen.

First, though, a bit of prudent reconnoitering.

She traveled a few hundred meters northeast, circling the steep slope above the geodh, and climbed to the top of Cnoc Uamh nam Fear, a small hillock that was the highest point on this part of the island. From its vantage point she let her ultrasenses range out. Westward was only open sea that stretched all the way to Canada. North across the water lay little Colonsay and Oronsay, and Mull, where the invading MacLeans had launched their invasion force centuries earlier. A few scattered bright emanations indicated the presence of harmless nonoperant human life. She turned, scanning Islay itself, and found the northern parts of the island almost deserted. At this time of year, only a handful of hardy visitors came, and the locals stayed mostly in snug villages on the southern and eastern shores. She found no operant minds nearby, no threat to her safety.

 … But what was
that?

As she faced in the direction she must travel she felt for the merest fraction of a second the weird aetheric disturbance that had frightened her when she visited Islay as a child. It was neither an aura nor the metapsychic resonance of minds working together. It was certainly not farspoken communication. It touched only the emotions, not the intellect, wordlessly urging her to fear for her life … run away … give up the journey before it was too late.

As swiftly as it came, the ultrasensation disappeared.

She cried out:
I’m not afraid of you! I won’t run from you, Hydra!

But was it Hydra? She replayed the elusive fragment, analyzing it with all the skill of a Grand Master Creator. Its source was not Hydra, not even Fury, but something else.

Something. Many things? Not threatening, only warning.

A frisson of unease touched her as she found herself remembering certain stories Malama had told her, frightening accounts of genuine “ghosts” whose unquiet spirits the Hawaiian woman had laid. One of them had been the unfortunate mother of Jack and Marc Remillard. With a dismissive shrug, the kahuna had admitted that the more sophisticated metapsychic practitioners of the Human Polity did not acknowledge the existence of “malignant
personality aspects” that were able to survive death and bedevil the living. But kahunas knew better.

Standing on top of the hill, Dee let her mind range out again, seekersense honed to the keenest. This time there was no evocation of deadly danger, no warning.

She thought of farspeaking Malama, even briefly considered asking her angel for advice and reassurance. But then a hot rush of resentment welled up in her, sweeping away any temptation that smacked of continuing childish dependence.

No one could help her except herself.

Malama had done all she could. The angel, that preprogrammed Lylmik artifact, had also told her she was on her own. Her mother, her uncle and aunt, even the other murder victims were quite dead and beyond communicating with her.
She
was alive and strong and ready to begin her life as an adult. If irrational fears or even genuine enemies stood in her way, she would have to remove them.

She set off for the Tòn Mhór headland a couple of kilometers to the northwest. As she strode along in the sunshine, she realized with a sudden burst of hopefulness that the Tòn, not the death-cave, marked the proper starting place for her journey. Perhaps she had not failed after all. Perhaps she had been a fool to think that she could accomplish her goal before completing the full pilgrimage.

When she reached the headland she sat for a time, resting against the same rock that had sheltered her and Ken and Gran Masha. She relived the original gyrfalcon dream in memorecall once again, this time without empathy, as though it were some fantasy drama and she an objective critic. She suffered no pain or fear, made no attempt to analyze the experience.

Next she retraced her panicky flight down the steep path where she had met Throma’eloo Lek. Before returning to the clifftop, she scanned the blackened ruins of Sanaigmore Farm and the lands around it. There was nothing unusual to be found. The nearest human beings were at Loch Gorm, six kilometers due south, and her farsight showed that they were only biologists taking a census of the swan population.

Staying as close to the precipitate shore as she could, she hiked down to sandy Sanaigmore Bay, passing roofless, abandoned crofts with stone walls that seemed to be slowly sinking into the ground. There was still hardly any wind, but the air seemed colder and more damp. Haze was slowly bleaching the blue sky to milky gray. Far offshore the horizon was beginning
to blur. As she continued her resolute tramp through sand dunes, small bogs, and areas of dead bracken, she marked the absence of seabirds that had been so abundant on her childhood trek. Even the ubiquitous “peeps”—the shorerunners that should have been rather common in winter—seemed to have disappeared.

After walking for over two hours she stopped to scan the sullen sea. It had turned leaden as the high overcast moved in. When she extended her farsight she encountered a bank of fog about a dozen kilometers offshore.

“Uh-oh,” she muttered, and switched her wrist-com to the weather channel. As she had feared, the fog was expected to move inland within a few hours. Still, if she stepped along briskly she might still reach the beach picnic shelter at Tràigh Nòstaig, completing the journey before visibility was too badly impaired.

She had not yet stopped for lunch. The other sea-cave, where she had seen the white gyrfalcon, was not far off.

When she came to the area above it she sat at the rim of a small gully and unwrapped her peanut-butter sandwich and orange. While she ate, her childhood musings over the splendid Greenland falcon drifted back into her mind. The bird had killed in order to live, and that had troubled her young conscience very much. When Dee grew older, she chose to minimize her consumption of flesh in order to spare the lives of higher animals. Janet and the nonborns had mocked her resolution, and most of her fellow students at Dartmouth had thought her a squeamish sentimentalist.

But she had felt that the abstinence was necessary.

At this time in the Galactic Age, the majority of philosophers and ethicists had rejected as illogical the idea that humans should not kill and eat living things. Milieu physics had demonstrated that
all
life, not merely that of higher animals, was enmeshed within the vital lattices. Even so-called inanimate objects were known to have a minimal share of vitality, and so if one avoided the consumption of life, one would consume nothing. Logic dictated that the proper food for the human species was that which had nurtured it throughout its evolution. Dee’s moral preceptors taught her that “Thou shalt not kill” really meant “Thou shalt not kill thine own kind—those who think.” The stewardship of other lifeforms and prevention of their needless suffering was properly regulated by prudence and logic; only the lives of sapient beings, whether human or not, fell under a solemn commandment.

Now, for the first time, Dee thought to ask herself why she was so anxious to spare animal life, when at the same time she would have gladly killed the humans who comprised Hydra.

Hydra is a murderer! A torturer who deserves to die.

 … Is that why you’re trying to trap it?

I want to bring it to justice. Stop it from killing again.

 … And if it tries to kill you?

I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to strike back with all of my mental strength! Kill it in self-defense. It’s perfectly justifiable.

 … And if you captured it and it didn’t try to harm you?

It would try. Of course it would. I’d have to kill it.
KILL IT EVEN MORE PAINFULLY THAN IT KILLED THEM!

 … There. Now you understand!

The section of orange she had just taken seemed to turn to dust in her mouth, half choking her and setting her to coughing. She had to drink quickly from her canteen to restore herself. Still breathing raggedly, her heart thudding in her breast, she stared at the stony ground.

Understanding.

Knowing the truth not only about her culpable witness to Hydra’s crime in the sea-cave, but also the truth about the promise she had given her father. There were mitigating circumstances for the first sin: overwhelming fear, and the egocentrism of a very young child. But the second action, back on Caledonia, had been quite different. Hearing her father’s agonized plea, she had decided just what she would do when she found her mother’s murderers. She would not simply capture them and bring them before the Milieu authorities, but—

“Oh, God,” Dee whispered, and covered her face with her hands.

Later, when the last fragment of the thing that had shattered inside her was gone, she was amazed to discover that it was late afternoon. Fog was stealing over the water, into the bays and coves, and making its first tentative foray onto the land. Dee packed up her things and climbed to her feet, aching all over, realizing that she must have been sitting there without moving for over two hours.

“Right,” she said aloud. “Definitely time to leave.”

It was a little over three kilometers to her journey’s end, where her car would be waiting. Once beyond Falcon Cave (and the ravine where she once thought she had seen the Kilnave Fiend) the walking would be fairly easy. She would have to stay
close to the cliff edge in order to avoid bogs, but her farsight would keep her safe in the thickening fog.

When she had passed this way as a child, she and the others had remained on the height above the beach and obtained only a partial view of the bird-cave. This time there was no surf, and she decided to take the low route to get a look at the cavern’s interior. A strong air current streaming from the large opening in the rocks blew the encroaching mist away. It was still very quiet except for the sound of her boots squeaking on the sand. Inside, the grotto was spacious and deep, much more impressive than Gilmour’s. The doves had unaccountably abandoned the place but their guano whitened many of the rocks protruding from the sandy floor.