Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (61 page)

Only one thing still puzzled her. Why had the Hydra-units failed to combine in metaconcert when they attacked her, rather than trying to subdue her physically? Even two of them working together would have been a match for her after her injury.

The solution to that mystery would have to wait.

Marshaling both her redaction and her farsight in the most efficient way possible, she set off on the trail to the car park.

Jack watched her go, then said a prayer of thanksgiving. Noiseless and invisible, he glided over the surface of the bog until he reached a dark shape half submerged in the water. It was the body of a young woman, naked except for a pair of stout hiking boots and so fearfully abraded that it seemed to be one vast open wound. Nearly all of Celine Remillard’s skin was torn away, and both arms had been ripped off at the shoulder as she was sucked and battered through the constricted rocky shaft by Dorothea Macdonald’s metacreative blast. She had no face.

Jack probed the brain of the Hydra carefully to make certain that life was extinct, then sent his powerful seekersense underground. His sister Madeleine and cousin Parnell had disappeared completely. It was to be expected that the Hydra had other secret exits from its death-cave.

Jack moved up into the sky, tracking Dorothea as she trudged doggedly along. She might deduce in time that the Hydras had avoided using metaconcert for a very good reason. They had suspected that Jack might guard Dorothea surreptitiously, and they knew that the emanations of their life-devouring mental combination would have drawn him to them like a beacon.

What they had not known was that Jack had been forbidden by the Lylmik Supervisors to interfere, even if Dorothea had died. It was only when she had escaped by her own efforts that
he allowed himself to divert her falling body toward a safe landing place. Once she had admitted herself to the hospital in Bowmore, he would go to her and show her how to heal her injuries quickly.

Fury would withdraw into siege mode now, guarding its two last precious links to physical reality. The mental signatures of the units would be changed again, and Madeleine and Parnell Remillard would eventually surface again with new identities and a fresh focus for meddling.

No matter how ingenious their disguise, however, Jack was confident that he would eventually find them and confine them. Then Fury would be all alone, forced to reveal itself. It would have no recourse but to take over the body it secretly shared with an innocent mind.

Father of Light, Jack prayed, help me learn how to kill it before then.

O
F ALL THE HIGHER MINDPOWERS, CREATIVITY IS THE STRANGEST.

Its expression differs greatly among the races of the Galactic Milieu—as anyone familiar with the slaphappy Gi and the anal-retentive Simbiari will attest. I’ve been told I have a goodly dollop of creativity, although I never allowed anyone to measure it—or any other contents of my skull, for that matter. I can recall only a few occasions that the power has been really useful to me. On the other hand, creativity may have influenced me more than I realize if my Family Ghost turns out to be a figment of my imagination and I, myself, am actually responsible for everything you have read.

Qu’à dieu ne plaise!

In human operants, metacreativity is the power most likely to be made latent and unusable by deleterious factors. Even when you’ve got it beaucoup and up the wazoo, you can lose it or have it seriously diminished by fatigue, illness, physical or mental trauma, or even getting up on the wrong side of the bed. Conversely, some emotions—fear, anger, lust!—can hype it all to hell. Not always, worse luck. But sometimes when you’d least expect it, a creative brainstorm can save your neck or win you a bundle.

Creativity is the faculty most likely to be very strong in normal humans, where it’s called talent or genius. In the days before metapsychology, hardly any educated Earthlings thought of creativity as a higher mindpower at all. But the primitives knew, and wisely identified it as the touch of the gods.

Every creature with true willpower possesses a modicum of it. Creativity is the integrator and modulator of the entire mind,
forming the linkage between thought and matter. It’s literally the inspiration—the “breathing in”—of the divine into what would otherwise be mere mud molecules. Le bon dieu had to tell us himself that humans are most godlike when they love one another. Left to ourselves, we equate godliness with creativity because human beings appreciate
results.

Psychologists and good schoolteachers know that creative potential is elusive and inborn. It doesn’t necessarily equate with high intelligence. It can be nurtured but it can’t be implanted when the inherited faculty itself is puny. There’s no way a person can acquire it by studying; but if you’ve got it and you work at it, overcoming obstacles in its pursuit, it grows muscles. Ignore it or suppress it and it withers and may even die. You can lose it due to aging or bodily infirmity, and grief is the greatest creativity slayer of all.

Creative insights can strike in an abrupt coup de foudre or be wrung painfully from the psyche over long periods of time. Creativity can sneak into the mind in a dream, sleeping or waking, but it doesn’t often fly in the window when you’re drunk or stoned … it only
seems
to, and then comes the cold gray dawn.

In normals, when left-brain creativity flags, it can often be spectacularly revived if one pursues a right-brain activity—and vice versa. Play music or drive a vehicle and the literary muse will be resuscitated. Read a book or balance the accounts and the artistic inspiration may return. It’s as though the creative stew must sometimes be left to cook on its own, undisturbed by mere ratiocination or willpower’s whip.

When creativity is frustrated or warped, the effect upon the possessor and the environment can be appalling, because creativity’s flip side is destruction.

It’s not necessarily true that great creativity in humans is closely allied to madness. This is discredited folklore. There have been human geniuses who suffered severe mental illness, particularly the manic-depressive kind; but by and large they seem to have been creative in spite of their disorder rather than because of it. Schizophrenia, a disease affecting the imagination, is most spectacular when the person’s imagination is extraordinary.

The loonies depicted in these memoirs of mine have often possessed high creative talent; but try to remember that the consummate creative villain of them all was eminently sane.

Metacreativity is the queen of metafaculties, more awesome in its potential than any of the others. The creativity of normals
yields ideas that may indirectly influence matter and energy. That of operants brings forth an idea that may
be
matter and energy.

The simplest aspect of creativity is the special aura that all living things have. Elementary metacreative tricks include such things as producing flames or lights through the chemical decomposition of organic or atmospheric molecules. Heating and cooling matter is also pretty easy for the average longhead, as is drying off things that are wet, which depends partly on creativity and partly on PK. Making a creative umbrella or other external shield is trickier because it depends upon the mental generation of a sigma-field, but most human masterclass metas learn how to do it eventually. Shape-shifting (which isn’t fully understood, involving as it does both “sender” and “receiver”), the generation of conventional illusions, and going invisible are middling creative. Actually putting together a physical body—even the shell of one—the way Jack did is gonzo-class creativity, on a par with the external assembly of organic matter, directing metaconcerts, and producing mindbolts of psychic energy.

I did that a few times by accident, but it’s easier with a CE hat. So are lots of other kinds of creative mischief-making, which is one of the main reasons why the Galactic Milieu outlawed cerebroenergetic enhancement after the Rebellion.

But now I’m getting ahead of myself …

Dorothée’s healing, assisted by Jack, stupefied the medical staff at the little Islay hospital. With no operants on the island, the medics were unfamiliar with the spectacular way in which powerful redactors can cure serious injuries. The operant community kept this information, and a whole lot more besides, more or less confidential in order to avoid “invidious comparisons.”

A normal Islay citizen of modest means suffering a deep muscle-destroying burn like Dorothée’s might have had to spend a month in a regen-tank—when one became available in a larger hospital on the mainland. (Healing through genetic engineering was not as routine in the seventies as it would be twenty years later.) Such expensive facilities were always available to operants who needed them, however; it was one of the side benefits the Milieu quietly vouchsafed to those it deemed the most important members of the human race.

With Jack’s redaction added to her own, Dorothée was discharged within three days—not fully restored, but able to function normally and without pain. She would have plenty of time
to deal with the cosmetic aspects of her wound herself during the starship flight to Concilium Orb.

In his statement to the police, Jack said only that he had come to Islay in search of background information on the original crimes, as had Dorothée herself. It was tacitly inferred by the locals that the famous young Remillard magnate and the hugely talented young woman were great and good friends, and he had been helping her investigate the old crime committed against members of her family.

The two of them did nothing to contradict this notion, but Dorothée was actually furious with Jack for shadowing her. It was only after a nasty telepathic wrangle that she consented to let him help with her healing—and then only because she didn’t want to stay in hospital any longer than necessary.

To the great exasperation of Inspector Chaimbeul, agents of the Galactic Magistratum converged upon the island to take charge of the latest investigation. The First Magnate himself put in an appearance, and he was mightily pissed off with the two young people for setting a Hydra trap without notifying him. But there was really nothing Paul could do about it; Dorothée had been completely unaware of the Dynasty’s secret search and Jack was a law unto himself.

All proceedings of the new Islay inquiry were sealed, with the exception of a terse announcement saying that Celia MacKendal, believed to be the perpetrator of the numerous killings that had taken place on the island in earlier years, had been found dead in a cave, together with the bones of her victims, by a girl hiker. The presence of the killer on Islay was not explained, but
The Scotsman
speculated that she might have been overcome with remorse and committed suicide at the scene of her grisly crimes.

The DNA of the woman who had attacked Dorothée yielded a positive identification of Celine Mireille Ashe Remillard, daughter of Maurice Remillard and Cecilia Ashe. The information was not made public, nor was it shared with the local police. The body was released to the custody of the First Magnate himself. After a private Catholic memorial service attended by certain anonymous operants, the ashes of the murderer were scattered over the Atlantic Ocean.

On 20 January 2073 Earth computation, her sixteenth birthday, Dorothea Mary Strachan Macdonald became a Magnate of the Concilium and was named a Paramount Grand Master in all five metafaculties. Her maiden speech, delivered a couple of weeks
later, was brief but moving: a plea that all operant members of the Human Polity renounce forever the use of higher mindpowers as weapons, even in a cause that might be deemed “just,” such as self-defense.

There was enthusiastic applause for the young woman’s naive idealism, plus a certain amount of trepidation among the Rebel contingent, who feared that Dorothée might become a new and vocal member of Anne Remillard’s pestiferous Unity Directorate. But instead the new paramount was quickly named First Deputy Dirigent of Caledonia, which effectively removed her from the forefront of Concilium politics.

Dorothée was both astounded and troubled by her unexpected appointment. She tried to decline the honor, insisting that she was too young and inexperienced for such responsibility, but the Lylmik Supervisors were adamant. The only concession she wrung from them was an agreement to review and evaluate her work critically in two years’ time, and remove her from office if she proved incompetent.

When she returned to the planet of her birth, she had a warm reunion with her father Ian, who had recently married Janet Finlay. Her nonborn adoptive siblings Ellen Gunn and Hugh Murdoch were overawed at her new position of authority, while the onetime bully Gavin Boyd was scared shitless of her until she assured him she held no grudge.

Dorothée lived in a simple apartment in Dirigent House in the Caledonian capital, New Glasgow, and spent the first year of her term learning her duties while acting as all-around dogsbody to the aging planetary executive, Graeme Hamilton.

His former First Deputy, Catriona Chisholm, was transferred to the populous cosmop planet Avalon, where she became Deputy to Usha Singh. Although this was technically a promotion for Chisholm, she was furious at being replaced by a raw teenager, even one with paramount faculties. Chisholm had expected to succeed Graeme Hamilton, but there was small chance of that happening now. Calum Sorley, the Scottish planet’s Intendant General, was livid at the thought of a youthful idealist “usurping” a position that the radical anti-Unity faction had counted heavily upon. Their scheme for manufacturing illegal CE equipment on Caledonia once Hamilton was out of the way had to be abandoned, with the result that the active phase of the Metapsychic Rebellion was put on hold for nearly a decade, until Satsuma was finally able to produce the mental weaponry.

Hamilton had been Dirigent since 2054, when the Simbiari Proctorship finally ended in the colonies. Before that he had served in the planet’s Intendant Assembly for over thirty years, he and his late wife having been among the first settlers. Graeme was a rugged old haggiswalloper who scorned rejuvenation, claiming that he had no time to waste floating in a vat of artificial amniotic fluid when there was work to be done. He knew every nook and cranny of Caledonia, was personally acquainted with almost every first-generation settler, and had tinkered and goosed the Scottish world’s economy to an unexpected state of prosperity, considering its paucity of natural resources.