Galactic Milieu - Diamond Mask Part 12

And heard something.

The world inside her head was no longer silent.

At first there were only weird hisses and howling noises, seeming to become louder and louder, that did not sound human at all. Dee was terrified, thinking that it might be the Fiend itself. What if it had followed her and was lurking somewhere in the darkened hotel room? She lay frozen in her bed, too scared even to cry out. Then little by little the mental jumble softened and clarified into muttered words. Only words. Like many people talking all at once over a communicator.

Could it be Mummie after all, trying to speak to her from inside the crowded Mind of the Universe?

As the mental sounds became more distinct, Dee realized that someone was talking about Mummie ... and about her ... and about Ken ... and about the police looking for the killer ... and about being responsible for two motherless children while still doing her work at the University unless she let Dee and Ken live with Ian ... and about Ian (who was Daddy) being hopelessly unsuitable ...

Gran!

Dee was overhearing Gran's thoughts as she lay sleepless in the next room.

It was farspeech-telepathy-and Dee hadn't even opened any box!

She concentrated harder. The other peculiar noises became bits of thinking from other people in the hotel who were still awake. Some thoughts were faint but exquisitely precise and clear, while others were blurry or twisted or rambling or an incomprehensible hodgepodge. Some of the hotel guests whose thoughts Dee could understand were worrying about things, like Gran was. Others were giving off wild and chaotic mental sounds and seemed to be very happy. A few were praying. One person was planning to sneak away without paying his bill.

When Dee got tired of listening she shut off the strands of farspeech one by one until her mind was quiet again. Then, awed and fascinated (but not yet frightened) by this new ultrasense, she brought the thoughts all back in a great snarl and practiced focusing on them individually. It was fun, and she quickly became adept.

Did operant people hear things like this all the time? And why had the new power come upon her so suddenly, without her wanting it?

Unfortunately, the angel remained silent as ever, although she did have the feeling that he was smiling triumphantly at her as she finally fell asleep.

The next day, before she and Gran and Ken went to the Bowmore police station to be formally questioned, Dee crept into the little hotel snuggery and called up a reference on fa.r.s.ensory latency from the data unit. The plaque she obtained from the dispenser turned out to be an article written for grownups, but she understood enough of it to realize that the shock and fear she had suffered had probably caused the telepathy box in her mind to open all by itself. Neither the therapists nor Gran Masha had ever hinted to her that this sort of thing might happen.

From the article she also learned that there were different kinds of mental speech with differing degrees of "loudness" or perceptibility. Blatant subvocal speech, farspoken shouts in the imperative mode, and casual declamatory mode conversation were so intense that even nonoperants might sometimes perceive them. The hardest to pick up were private narrow-beam thoughts precisely directed along another operant person's intimate mental pathway. She had obviously been hearing the loudest kind of telepathy.

Then she had read the words that made her heart sink: Fa.r.s.ensing is the major indicator of metapsychic operancy.

She knew what that meant. She was no longer a deadhead, no longer a normal, even though most of her powers were still safely imprisoned in their boxes. If Gran or any other operant adult ever found out that she was telepathic, she would surely be sent back to the therapists. And even worse- Ken might be allowed to go live with Daddy on Caledonia; but unless she kept this new power of hers a secret, she would be forced to stay on Earth.

By acting dazed with grief (which wasn't really very hard to do), Dee managed to fool everyone at the police station. She hid behind her blue mind-screen almost all of the time and only came "out" to answer direct questions. Not even the handsome, grandly dressed First Magnate or the Krondak Magistratum official realized that she could read their minds when they made casual declamatory telepathic comments to each other about the case.

Dee found out that the terrible black dream-monster she'd called the Kilnave Fiend was really a thing named Hydra, somehow made of the put-together minds of four wicked adults- including John Quentin and Magdala MacKendal. The Hydra had lived in the spooky big farmhouse at Sanaigmore, just as she had suspected. Dee learned the names of the other two people who made up the Hydra, and she discovered that it had killed many other people, not just Mummie and Aunt Rowan and Uncle Robbie.

All the while that she eavesdropped on the others' thoughts, she kept perfect control of her features and her actions so no one would realize that she was listening. It had been hardest of all for her to keep a straight face when the Krondaku told the First Magnate that the Hydra had escaped and was no longer on Earth.

Now she didn't have to worry about it getting her!

When the questioning was finally over, Dee and Ken and Gran had been allowed to go back home to Edinburgh. Two days later, they all dressed up and went to church, even though it wasn't Sunday. The place was full of people from the University, and up front, on a stand in the sanctuary, were three small boxes that Gran said held the ashes of Mummie, Uncle Robbie, and Aunt Rowan.

After the Requiem Ma.s.s they got into groundcars and went to the cemetery, where the boxes were put into little holes in the ground, surrounded by bouquets of flowers. The priest said in his last prayer that the chemical elements that Mummie and Uncle Robbie and Aunt Rowan had borrowed for a while to use in their bodies now had to be returned to the Earth to be used again by other living things. He reminded everybody that those same elements had been made billions of years ago, long before there was even a solar system, when an ancient star exploded in a supernova and scattered its ashes into s.p.a.ce. All living things, the priest said, had bodies made from the recycled dust of dead stars; but the minds that bloomed spontaneously into the vital-mental lattices when elements from the matter-energy lattices combined in s.p.a.ce-time to make a living thing were completely unique and immortal.

Dee found the notion of being made from Stardust very interesting. While the people standing around the graves were saying goodbye to each other, she whispered to Ken that she thought it was too bad that Mummie's elements would only become soil for cemetery flowers and trees to grow in.

"When I die," she confided, "I want my elements to help make a new star!"

"You're daft," Ken hissed angrily. His face was stained with tears. "Stark staring crackers." He stooped, picked up something from among the tree roots, and thrust it into her hand. "This is what you'll make when you die. Squirrel food!"

"Hush," said Gran Masha. "Behave yourselves for just a little longer."

Dee had looked at the acorn for a long time. Then she had put it carefully into her coat pocket.

The children were allowed to bring only a few things along with them on the starship journey to Caledonia. Dee had been content to let Gran pick out her clothes. The things she chose for herself included her goosedown bed pillow, a little pla.s.s boite of flecks that held her favorite books, a china cat called Moggie that was her mascot, the acorn from the cemetery, which she intended to plant on Daddy's farm, and her most prized possession-a lapel pin with a bent clasp that she had found glittering on an Edinburgh sidewalk one rainy day last fall. It had the shape of a domino mask and was entirely encrusted with rhinestones. Even though Ken had scoffed, Dee remained convinced that it was a piece of valuable lost treasure, and she was sure that the stones were real diamonds.

She also begged Ken to let her carry Daddy's picture. Looking at it, she told him earnestly, would help her not to be scared on the trip. He made fun of that idea, too, but finally gave in when she promised to let him look at the old photo whenever he wanted to.

When everything was finally ready, Gran had taken Dee and Ken to Unst Starport in the Shetland Islands, where the three of them boarded the ship that would take them to Caledonia. It was going to take fourteen Earth days to travel the 533 lightyears in daily leaps of about 40 df.

Every single day they would go in and out of hypers.p.a.ce. And Gran would make Dee take the medicine that would leave her mind and her secrets exposed ... unless Ken's idea worked.

When the captain's image appeared on the Tri-D monitor in their stateroom about an hour after subluminal lift-off, warning that the first hop into hypers.p.a.ce was imminent, Gran Masha got out the packet of minidosers. She let Ken hold one of the tiny green pillow-shaped things to his temple and press it with his thumb. A hair-thin needle sprang out of the doser's underside, p.r.i.c.ked him painlessly, and injected the drug. Ken fell at once into a deep sleep.

"Let me do it to myself, too," Dee pleaded. "I'm not afraid."

"Very well," said Gran. "Be sure to put the side with the white circle next to your skin, and then press hard."

But Dee only pretended to inject herself, letting the little green doser fall into the crevice between her recliner-couch's seat and armrest just as she had planned, so Gran would not see that it was still full. She flopped back dramatically and closed her eyes with a slight sigh as Ken had, then she withdrew into her comforting rosy redactive pool and awaited the pa.s.sage into the gray limbo. She heard faint noises as Gran sat down at the stateroom desk and rustled some durofilm printouts. The ship's low displacement factor would hardly bother Gran at all. She had said she would try to get a little work done while the children had their nap.

There was a peculiar snapping sensation, a zang and then a zung. And then the ship's captain announced that they were through the upsilon-field gateway and safe on their catenary, taking a shortcut through s.p.a.ce-time faster than the speed of light.

Dee had felt no pain. None at all, although Gran had said that even the most powerful adult operants usually experienced a little twinge as they entered hypers.p.a.ce- "Oh, Dorothea. Why didn't you tell me?"

Dee lifted her eyelids the least crack. Gran Masha was standing over her. "Don't bother pretending. I know you're not asleep. Why have you hidden this from me?"

Dee opened her eyes the rest of the way. "Hidden what?"

"Your self-redacting ability. That's what it is, isn't it?" Gran knelt beside the couch. "You silly, silly child! If you'd taken the medication, your aura would have changed-and it didn't. And since you obviously felt no pain at the translation ... How long have you been operant in the self-redacting metafaculty? Tell me the truth!"

"Since-since the ferryboat trip to Islay," Dee admitted.

"How did it happen?"

Dee avoided her grandmother's trenchant gaze. "I-well-I just wanted not to be seasick anymore. And I wasn't." She could feel Gran trying with all her strength to get inside her head, trying to find out the truth. Gran's coercion was much more powerful than that of Mummie or the therapists, but the blue shield held fast. Because of the new power, Dee could also "hear" Masha's blaring telepathic questions: Can you perceive my mindspeech Dorothea can you hear me? Can you use the redactivepower on others as well as yourself? Do you have other new metafunctions? Are you breaking through into fulloperancy? Answerme Dorothea answerme!

The five-year-old girl's face was a picture of childish sincerity. Her desperate fear was masked by the impregnable mind-screen. "The redact power isn't really special, Gran. I just found out I could wish away bad feelings. Like when something hurts or makes me feel yucky."

Dorothea can you hear me?

Dee sat up and carefully put the minidoser she had concealed onto the table beside her couch. "Can I go to the observation lounge? The captain said we could look at the gray limbo there. Will Kenny wake up soon? I know he'd like to see the limberlost, too."

ANSWER ME CHILD CAN YOU HEAR MY MINDSPEECH?.

Yes, she could. And she was so terror-stricken that she could hardly speak-but she was careful to give no outward sign of it.

"Please, can I go to the observation lounge?" she repeated in a tremulous whisper, edging toward the stateroom door. "I-I really want to see the gray limbo."

Gran caught her by the hand, her green-crystal eyes bright with a compulsive power that Dee had never before experienced. Telepathic questions amplified by coercion thundered in Dee's mind, smashing against her blue barrier like storm waves battering a cliff.

ANSWERANSWERANSWER! "Dorothea, listen to me!" YOU MUSTANSWER! "If there is a chance that you are becoming spontaneously operant to a significant degree, then it's important that we continue your therapy. On Earth. We won't go to the doctors in Edinburgh anymore, the ones you don't like. We'll go to Catherine Remillard in America. She's a kind, wonderful woman. You'll like her. Please, dear! You must let me know if you can perceive farspeech. You must." TELLME TELLME TELLME!

No! I won't! Angel, make me stronger! Help me ...

TELL ME THE TRUTH! Gran's full coercive strength demanded. ANSWER ANSWER ANSWER!

Dee's mind-screen held in spite of her mortal terror. The angel helped her prop it up.

Dee managed to smile at her grandmother. Her face was open and innocent. "I really want to live with Daddy, not on Earth. I'm mostly normal, Gran. Just like him . .. Can I go to the lounge now?"

Gran let go of Dee's hand. "Yes," she said in a dull, defeated tone. The formidable coercer had retreated. "You may go. But there's nothing much to see. Limbo is really a very frustrating state. Neither being nor nonbeing."

She turned away to take care of Ken, who was tossing and mumbling as he began to regain consciousness.

Giddy with relief, Dee hurried off along the narrow, silent corridors, stopping from time to time to look at illuminated diagrams with blinking YOU ARE HERE dots. She only met one other person, a member of the crew who grinned and gave her a playful salute before entering one of the cargo holds. Before the door closed behind him, Dee caught a glimpse of yellow rhocraft with checkered belts standing in rows like gigantic Easter eggs: new flying taxis bound for Caledonia. Gran Masha had told the children that the ship carried vital necessities such as road-building equipment, embryonic livestock, medicines, and also things that simply made life more pleasant on a frontier world-Monopoly games, Italian shoes, Swiss wrist-coms, and special foods like oranges and pineapple and chocolate that would not grow on the Scottish planet. Perhaps the strangest cargo was a shipment of empty sherry barrels from Spain. They were needed for one of Caledonia's most important industries-whisky-making!

The CSS Drumadoon Bay was gigantic, like most commercial starships, over 400 meters long. It was also very old, being one of the first colonial merchantmen built by humanity after the advanced science of the Galactic Milieu revolutionized Earth astronautics overnight. A freighter with limited and spartan pa.s.senger accommodations, it had offered the cheapest fare to Caledonia. Masha had been quietly furious when she discovered that Daddy had sent a pair of economy-cla.s.s tickets for Dee and Ken, relegating them to the open cabin. Fortunately, the professor was able to upgrade and get the three of them a small stateroom. The first-cla.s.s accommodations had mostly been snapped up by miners, xen.o.biologists, civil engineers, salvage archaeologists, medical specialists, and other professionals who had contracted for limited tours of duty on the rugged ethnic planet. There were also sixty new settlers among the pa.s.sengers, but most of them traveled in economy cla.s.s, sleeping in cubbyholes hardly larger than teleview booths when they were not amusing themselves in the recreation rooms or eating in the common mess.

Dee thought the starship was marvelous and never noticed the threadbare tartan carpeting, the scuffed and dented pla.s.s bulkheads, or the unpleasant chemical smell pervading their cramped en suite bath.

The observation lounge, when she found it, was much smaller than the one on the ferryboat to Islay and more modestly furnished. Two dozen scruffy easy chairs, all empty, faced a viewport of transparent cerametal five meters in diameter.

Outside the window was ... nothing.

Dee stood transfixed at the sight of the hyperspatial matrix. It was not really gray, nor was it black or white or any other color she could name. It shone at the same time that it seemed to soak up the artificial light from the lamps in the lounge, making the place seem dim and cavelike but eerily lacking in shadows. If one stared keenly at the gray limbo it was featureless; but a sidelong glance seemed to detect minute trembling motions and larger ghostly waveforms racing in all directions. At irregular intervals the cryptic nothingness seemed racked by an enormous throb that overwhelmed the lesser pulsations. Hypers.p.a.ce seemed to Dee to be alive, and she could not take her bedazzled eyes off it even when they began to hurt and she felt increasingly dizzy. It never occurred to her to call upon her self-redaction. She dared not look away from that bewitching window! Any moment now, something stupendous would surely happen- "Now then, la.s.sie. I think that's enough."

Someone took hold of her shoulders gently and spun her about, away from the maddening, irresistible gray.

Dee blinked and the spell was broken. She shivered, wiped her eyes, and saw that her rescuer was a tall man wearing a black velvet jacket with silver b.u.t.tons. He had on a fancy white shirt, a black bow tie, and a kilt of scarlet with a lattice of black stripes and thin lines of gold. His sporran was white leather with silver ta.s.sels, his shoes had silver buckles, and there was a small knife with a jewel in the hilt tucked into the top of his right stocking. He guided Dee to a chair near the snack bar, sat her down facing away from the viewport, and ordered the bar to produce a cup of sweet milky coffee.

"The gray limbo's a fascinating thing," the man said, "but it can drive a body clean daft if you keep staring at it."

The steaming drink arrived in a thickish pla.s.s mug with no saucer or spoon. The man presented it to her with a theatrical flourish and a charming smile that lifted one side of his mouth higher than the other. His chin had an attractive cleft and he was very good-looking, with hair that was completely white and glittering eyes so deeply sunken she could not tell their color.

"My name is Ewen Cameron and I'm going to Caledonia to see some friends," he said. "Drink this and the dizziness will go away. Experienced star-travelers know that if you want to look at the limbo, you must always make an effort to turn away every few minutes. Coerce yourself if need be."

Dee took brief sips of the drink to be polite. She really didn't much care for coffee and wished that the man had ordered hot chocolate. "Thank you, Citizen Cameron. I'll remember what you said."

"What's your name, la.s.s?"

She told him. The drink made her feel better almost at once. How funny, she thought. It was delicious, and now it really did taste very much like chocolate! Perhaps it was a special kind of Caledonian coffee. She drank it all and set the cup aside. Her fellow pa.s.senger had ordered coffee for himself as well, but she caught a whiff of something else in the steam wafting from his cup. He'd put brandy in it, just like Uncle Robbie did-had done-sometimes.

"Does that stuff make the coffee taste better?" she asked.

"Yes-if you're an old man with creaky bones, brandy makes it much better." Are you feeling all right now?

"Yes, thank you."

Good. Now tell me: Why didn't you take the dose of painkiller that's provided for nonoperant children?

She giggled, still feeling slightly light-headed. "I thought I'd see if I could dodge the pain instead. And I did. It was easy."

So you redacted yourself, did you?

"Only a little bit," she said quickly. "A very little bit. I'm not really an operant at all."

You mean you would like not to be one. But you'll have to do much better than this if you want to continue hiding your powers from your grandmother. She will bring you back to Earth if she finds out, you know. The Milieu law regarding metapsychically talented children takes precedence over the rights of a nonoperant parent. Any adult operant who discovers that you are capable of farspeech has a legal obligation to report the fact to the authorities. So you'll have to be very careful. Especially around strong coercers like your Gran who might try to diddle you into demonstrating your ultrasensitivity. Do you understand what I'm saying?

"Yes. I'm a child prodigy and very mature for my age. But you're wrong about me being ultrasensitive. I-" She broke off, her eyes widening in sudden dismay, realizing what she had been doing. "No!" she moaned.

Yes. You answered me when I spoke telepathically.

She sprang to her feet. "It's not fair! You tricked me!" She would have run away, but her feet seemed glued to the tatty carpet.

"Quite right," he admitted, speaking aloud. "I tricked you to show you that you're very young and very vulnerable, and without help you'll never be able to deceive Gran Masha and stay with your father on Caledonia. You do want to stay, don't you?"

"Yes." YesyesYES!

He stretched out his hand, laid it gently on top of her head, and smiled in sudden bemus.e.m.e.nt. "An angel! How apropos. Let's delegate the job to him, shall we?"

Completely mystified, Dee was taken by surprise when a new thing bloomed within her mind. No ... it was not really a thing at all: it was a way. A linked series of steps leading to a goal she desperately desired. Following that way, she need never fear that she would inadvertently disclose her last great secret to Gran or anyone else. The angel would help keep her mind's mask in place and he would also stop her from making stupid mistakes-as she had just done by responding to the tall man's farspeech.

"Did you put those things into my head?" she asked him timidly.

He placed both their empty cups into the bar's disposal and then headed for the door leading to the corridor. "You would have learnt to be cautious about farspeech and found the proper counteraction to coercion yourself after a while. I simply helped you along so that nothing would prevent you from staying with your father. It's important that you live with him now."

She stared up at the man in the kilt, overcome with wonder. "Are you my angel?"

He laughed. "Only this once. But you'll have others when you need them." He left the lounge, closing the door behind him.

Dee's wrist-com peeped. She pressed RECEIVE and Gran's voice said: "Your brother is awake now and the captain has invited all the first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers for a visit to the command bridge, to show us how the ship is run. Would you like to come, too?"

"Oh, yes! I'd love to! Wait for me, Gran. I'll be there in just a second."

She pulled the door open and dashed out into the corridor, all memory of the man named Ewen Cameron erased from her mind.

The ship's final exit from the hyperspatial matrix into the star system of Caledonia was a moment of magic for Dee. Poor Ken lay drugged in the stateroom and so he missed experiencing the event live, as did the other zonked-out normals aboard. But Dee and Gran and twenty or so operant pa.s.sengers sat watching in the observation lounge when the ship burst out of featureless subs.p.a.ce for the last time.

The mesmerizing gray outside the window shattered into a blaze of turbulent color. And then a planet appeared, very large and three-quarters-lit against a backdrop of diamond-flecked black. Sparkling artificial satellites hovered about Caledonia like fireflies, and seeming to look over its shoulder was the world's natural moon, Re Nuadh, appearing to be shiny and flat as an oval silver medal.