Galactic Milieu - Diamond Mask Part 2

"You keep those d.a.m.n volatile sulfur compounds under control this time," Marc warned the child. "I'm in no mood for a pong-up. And for G.o.d's sake, no puddles on the floor or gooey blobs floating around in the air. Keep your s.h.i.t together so you can take out what you came in with when we leave here."

"I'll be neat, I promise."

Jack's clothing, unfastened by psychokinesis, fell away. Then his realistic sh.e.l.l of pseudoflesh-the warm skin, the black wavy hair, the eyes, teeth, fingernails, and all that his unrivaled metacreativity had concocted from air, atmospheric water vapor, dust, and other odds and ends-became tenuous and ectoplasmic. His body streamed and dripped away like thick fog, the internal quasi-organs needed for certain imitative human activities dissolved, and his face melted into smoky wisps, with the excited grin and the bright blue eyes lingering longest.

In moments, the discarded solid and liquid portion of Jack's corporeal envelope re-formed into a gently quivering pinkish spheroid of organic soup about the size of a large grapefruit. It rested on the laboratory floor, right between a pair of small empty sneakers with muddy socks still in them. What remained of the boy, suspended in midair and looking mysteriously elegant rather than repulsive, was a glistening, silver-gray naked brain that housed a mind preeminently operant in all of the metafaculties. In this form Jack processed input only through his ultrasenses, communicated via telepathy, and acted by means of psychokinesis and the metacreative function. His life-processes were self-sustained redactively by direct interaction with the atmosphere and photons of light. Jack the Bodiless was invulnerable to most injury, immune to disease, and could, at any time, refashion for himself a new human form or any other material housing that struck his fancy.

Fury could neither inflict physical damage upon Jack nor penetrate his perfect mental screen with a coercive-redactive ream. Nevertheless, if this experiment succeeded, the first step in the ultimate destruction of the Great Enemy would have been taken.

The micromanipulator comset that had been hovering above the floating brain settled into place. Since the device had a non-invasive brainboard interface and could respond to thought input, it was as easy for Jack to use as it was for an embodied person.

Nervous telepathic giggles bubbled in the aether. Jack said: First the wipe & then TheBigTweak!!!

He began the modification and the holographic imagery of the improperly modified ECI seemed to go wild. Displays indicating the progress of the work turned into a featureless blur as tools darted in and out of nowhere at lightning speed, plucking at the electrochemical unit, tearing it down and building it up again. Microscopic organelle supply-slaves zipped hither and yon in the fluid of the model brain ventricle like demented bacteria, carrying tiny bits and pieces for insertion or disposal. When the ECI modification was finished, a glom command fleck completely reprogrammed by Jack through molecular-beam epitaxy was married to the SIE's central processor.

Marc watched incredulously as the operations that had taken him hours to accomplish were done in less than twenty minutes by his mutant brother. His admiration was frankly tinged by the envy that had lately begun to undermine the compa.s.sion he felt for young Jack's grotesque physical condition. Was Mental Man really to be pitied-or was he, the embodied one, the true unfortunate? What would it be like to be free of nearly all of the body's needs and limitations? To be able to channel all vital energies toward cerebration? Jack did require a limited amount of sleep, but most of his other physical functions were automatic. When he wore a body, he ate and drank only to be sociable. He never experienced physical pain because he had not bothered to fashion the receptors within his pseudoflesh. His mind's function was hardly ever skewed or limited by the biochemical deterioration that occurred in an ordinary person's body during the course of a day's work. He would never be driven to irrational actions by turbulent s.e.x hormones- Jack said: There that's done let's run a full Mode2 simulation shall we?

"Yes," said Marc aloud. "Go ahead with a regular helmet test." Whattheh.e.l.l we might as well know whether we've got a hot new CErig here or just another b.l.o.o.d.ybonkerbucket.

In actual operation, a complete set of the newly redesigned SIEs would be incorporated into a CE helmet having an external energy source. When a person donned the helmet and gave the proper telepathic command, his skull and cerebral tissue would be penetrated by a series of hair-thin electrodes nicknamed the "crown of thorns," the tips of which would come to rest within the cerebral and diencephalic ventricles, three fluid-filled hollow places in the operator's brain. The drilling procedure was only minimally uncomfortable as the scalp was pierced, since the brain itself was insensitive to pain. At another command, 26 SIEs with their two supervisory SIECOM units would emerge from the electrode-tips and bloom within the right and left lateral ventricles. A single master SIECOMEX unit would unfold within the third ventricle, above the brainstem. When the CE equipment energized, the operator's mental potential would, in theory, be greatly multiplied. Unfortunately, certain other brain activities might also be augmented by improperly tuned implants, leading to side effects that ranged from mildly annoying to fatal. The risk to the CE operator increased in direct proportion to the amount of mental enhancement generated by the equipment, especially in metacreativity designs.

When Jack the Bodiless began his test, the image of the newly modified SIE tree with its baroque ornaments seemed to glow within its bath of artificial cerebrospinal fluid. Responding to Jack's initiation command, the single unit triggered a complex flood of mind-boosting neurosecretions to a model operator-brain roughly equal in mental a.s.say to that of a grandmastercla.s.s operant. For a few seconds, the executive processor let the new cerebroenergetic enhancement "cook," activating certain portions of the cerebral cortex that were ordinarily unused. Then the SIECOMEX phased in the equivalent of 25 additional SIE units also having the modification. At this point Jack commanded the fully equipped brain simulation to evaluate itself in the metacreativity mode, and the most critical part of the test began.

Marc said: Neurometrics looking good mondingofrelot d.a.m.ngood.

Jack said: Limbics okay this time both hemispheres syncing on creative parameters feedback beautiful I'm going to ask for the overall evaluation now Marco letusPRAY!!

The holodisplay changed abruptly to a flickering ma.s.s of graphical a.n.a.lysis that almost defied Marc's ability to keep up with it. In less than six minutes, the a.n.a.lyzer simulated an hour of CE equipment use by a metapsychic operant of high mental status. While there was increasing minor dysfunction in certain areas, the psych.o.r.esultant showed an upgrade in creative metafaculty output somewhat greater than Jack had originally antic.i.p.ated.

IT WORKS! shrieked the enraptured boy-mind.

"Yes," Marc said. "It certainly does. In theory." He watched the continuing simulation for some time with a slight, one-sided smile. Then he reached out and shut down the machine. "The new design is practicable and all I have to do is build it and tune it and test it on a meat-brain."

How long do you think that'll take?

Marc shrugged. "Seven months-maybe less. I'll be the guinea pig, of course."

ME TOO pleaseMarcoPLEASE- "Don't be silly. You can help with the helmet design work in your spare time, but that's all. Testing this new rig will be dangerous and expensive, and there are also tricky political considerations that'll need juggling. The college administrators are getting more and more antsy about the project."

But- "Don't argue! You're only a kid, Jack. A brilliant and talented and bizarro kid-but in the eyes of the law and of Dartmouth College you have no business messing around with hazardous equipment. Now put yourself back together again and let's get the h.e.l.l out of here."

Fury paid no attention as Jack the Bodiless rea.s.sumed his former aspect of a ten-year-old child. Jubilant at what it had just witnessed, the monster had already abolished its presence in the laboratory and was soaring eastward over the Atlantic Ocean toward the British Isles, indulging in delicious speculation.

Until now, the practical applications of cerebroenergetics had been relatively prosaic, and not particularly useful to Fury. For over half a century, simple CE devices had been used for recreational romps in various virtual-reality environments; but the potentially addictive amus.e.m.e.nts were now hedged about with legal restrictions and forbidden to children altogether, while CE equipment incorporating more elaborate technology was widely utilized, even by normals, for specialized education and for operating sophisticated machinery.

CE augmentation of the metapsychic functions was still in its infancy, however. It was a uniquely human endeavor that the five other races of the Milieu viewed with both awe and misgiving. Exotic critics judged the new technology to be just one more way for upstart humanity to endanger the stability of the Galactic Mind.

Redactive CE was sometimes used by operants performing delicate psychosurgery or retroevolutionary genetic engineering. Psychokinetic boosting had been applied to macromolecular synthesis and complex nanotechnology such as the building of elaborate electronic, photonic, or bionic flecks. Lately, even more powerful "barber-chair" CE requiring life support as well as brain implantation had been used to boost the mental capacity of PK operants working on subatomic projects. Similar equipment, potentially very hazardous to the operator, had been used by fa.r.s.ensory adepts probing the gray limbo of hypers.p.a.ce in search of experimental evidence for the three hypothetical "matrix fields" that were believed to form the ultimate basis of reality.

Significant augmenting of the creative metafunction, the higher mindpower that might theoretically have the greatest impact upon the physical universe, was thought by many Milieu authorities to be of dubious potential, not only because of the inherently grave risk to the mind utilizing the technology, but also on account of the danger of misapplication.

The latter, of course, was what most intrigued Fury.

Marc Remillard had no doubts whatsoever about the practicability of creativity enhancement. He had experimented with different types of brain-boosting for years, and he persisted with his research into the far frontiers of creativity magnification when more conservative workers in the CE field held back. His work was given academic respectability under the aegis of Dartmouth College, and the papers he published were acknowledged to be brilliant. But certain powerful faculty members of the Department of Metapsychology had objected strenuously to the E15 project on ethical grounds, also intimating that young Professor Marc Remillard was arrogant, high-handed, contemptuous of his more prudent colleagues, and insufficiently sensitive to the metapsychic Pandora's box his work might open.

Marc pooh-poohed the timidity of his critics while loftily ignoring slights to his character. Greatly enhanced creativity was not for every mind, that went without saying. In his opinion, only the most powerful grandmastercla.s.s operants of proven mental stability were suitable candidates. As for the ethical questions, he maintained that they could be confronted and dealt with once the E15 equipment was operable, at the time that individual CE creativity projects were proposed. It was the misuse of the technology, not the technology itself, that might be adjudged immoral. Application guidelines should be and would be developed for creativity augmentation, just as they had been developed for nuclear energy and even for metafunction itself, which had posed similar ethical problems.

When Jack the Bodiless became secretly involved in the experiments of his elder brother, he confessed that he was seriously concerned about the moral dilemma; but he was only a child, after all, with limited experience in matters of good and evil in spite of his towering intellect. Marc's arguments in favor of the E15 research had been very persuasive.

It had taken the two strangely compatible colleagues a little over a year to proceed from bare-bones theory to this monumental breakthrough. Beyond a doubt they would now continue to work together unofficially, attaining even greater success in times to come.

Fury was quite proud of the brothers, even though they were flawed and unlovable. All unawares they had furthered the monster's grand scheme.

If only Fury could have used the new CE technology itself! But that was a fundamental impossibility, since the ent.i.ty presently lacked a genuine physical presence, being even less substantial than the Lylmik. It was Fury's Hydra component, tucked away in a safe corner of Earth for a number of years while slowly maturing, that would be the proper beneficiary of creativity enhancement.

Wearing this new E15 helmet, even nonoperants might find their natural creative gifts producing novel inventions, worthy artwork, or spectacular stratagems for altruism or villainy- provided that the brain of the operator was strong enough to withstand the device's potential. A metapsychic possessing strong natural creativity, as the Hydra-units did, would be able to accomplish deeds that normal humans would deem G.o.dlike: complex material synthesis; geophysical alteration; ma.s.sive ionic acc.u.mulation, discharge, and control. Transforming matter into directed energy would be child's play to such an operator, who would command the equivalent of a gigawatt mental laser.

The Hydra would eventually have to increase and multiply in order to take full advantage of the breakthrough, but that was also part of Fury's great plan. After suitable training, the CE-equipped creature, acting in metaconcert with Fury, need utilize no other weapons save its augmented multiplex brain in order to destroy the present galactic confederation and establish a Second Milieu ...

Provided that this new E15 technology was not suppressed by meddling regulatory officials, to die aborning.

The Scottish threat to Marc's project, the nearly completed adverse statistical report on long-term CE operator safety that would very likely bring all human creativity-boosting research to an abrupt halt, must now be neutralized without delay.

Obliterating the data was not the answer. The Edinburgh team would simply reconstruct it. There was only one way to make certain that Marc's project was not endangered: all three of the Scottish researchers would have to die. And Hydra, Fury's creature and its only safe link to the matter/energy-s.p.a.ce/time lattices, was the only one who could do the job.

Taking out three mastercla.s.s metapsychics without a trace was well within the Hydra's competence; but it would still be a tricky operation, especially if it was done in the environs of the University of Edinburgh, that teeming hive of leery and powerful Celtic operants. A misstep (the Hydra-units were still very young and overconfident, and some sort of c.o.c.k-up was all too likely) and the creature itself might be imperiled.

That would be totally unacceptable. Fury was severely limited in the physical sphere without Hydra, and its work was further complicated by periods of enforced dormancy. As a matter of fact, the present window of activity was about to close, and soon Fury would have to withdraw; but there was time yet to see Hydra on the track of its prey.

Clever, precious Hydra! The units were twenty-two years of age now, and while they had not stinted in supplying themselves with their primary source of mental nourishment, the killings had been done at decent intervals with admirable ingenuity. No suspicion had ever fallen upon the four disguised ent.i.ties. The Hydra now was well educated, polished to a reasonably sophisticated l.u.s.ter, and very nearly ready to operate in the arena of the Galactic Milieu.

This particular executive action would be good training for similar exercises in the future. The three Scottish researchers would have to be lured out of their sanctuary at the university, then eliminated without a trace. Once they were gone and their data destroyed, Marc would face no significant opposition to his project. No other CE safety-study groups on Earth or on human colonial planets posed any imminent danger.

The monster hovered above the British Isles for some time, studying various aspects of the situation together with the dramatis personae involved. Then at last it called.

Fury? ...

FuryFurydearestFury is it YOU after allthistime?

But what happened not single word from you not a farsqueak for more than 3years!

But G.o.dalmighty 3years 3friggingyears I thought you'd forgotten ME/us thought your grandscheme was ruined thought the Great-Enemy might have won thought UncleFred/you might really have died- !!Tell ME/us!!

3.

INNER HEBRIDES, SCOTLAND, EARTH,.

25-26 MAY 2062.

During the brief rhocraft flight from Edinburgh to the west coast of Scotland, the five-year-old child who called herself Dee studied the durofilm sea chart that Gran Masha had given her. They were going to travel to their holiday destination in a very special way-not in an ordinary inertialess egg-bus but on an old-fashioned ferryboat nearly a hundred years old.

From the air, the boat looked like a strange toy, its contours dimmed by mist; but then the egg landed at the dockside pad and Dee and the others disembarked and were able to see the ancient vessel closely. It was huge, looming there in the drizzle, as unlike the small pleasure boats of Granton Harbour near Dee's home as Edinburgh Castle is unlike a regular townhouse. The ferry had a scarlet funnel and a black-and-white hull and an earsplitting whistle that echoed from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e in the rainswept narrow sea-loch. It seemed to urge those on sh.o.r.e to get aboard quickly or be left behind.

Mummie took one of Dee's hands and Aunt Rowan took the other. Loudspeakers on the ferry broadcast an eerie bagpipe melody as they went up the gangplank. Tall, imposing Gran Masha in her smart green tweed walking suit led the way, towing Dee's brother Ken, and Uncle Robbie brought up the rear carrying their bags.

"This is weird," Ken said, as they all arrived on the wet and windy deck. Pennants were flapping, pa.s.sengers in raingear were laughing and taking pictures, and a ship's officer was directing people to move along. "Maybe," the boy added, "we'll have a good time on this holiday after all."

"An inquiring mind," said Mummie tartly, "will find things to enjoy no matter what place it finds itself in."

"It's going to be fun," Gran Masha declared. She gave Ken's hand an encouraging squeeze and smiled at Dee, who cringed as the ferryboat whistle gave another deafening hoot. Then the gangplank rose, the mooring lines were cast off, and they were on their way.

Groundcars bound for the Western Isles had been driven up a ramp into the hold and abandoned there; but the humans and the handful of exotic tourists making the voyage rode in the upper part of the ferryboat, where there were places to eat, and places to sit and look out of the windows at the gray sea, and a game room, and a souvenir store, and even tiny cabins to sleep in if you were traveling to one of the Outer Hebrides that were depicted on Dee's chart, all connected to each other and to the Inner Hebrides and to the mainland of Scotland by a web of red lines that signified the Vee-routes of the egg transports. Only a handful of the Western Isles were served by the picturesque old ferries, whose routes were shown by black dots.

One of those islands was Islay.

By the time Dee and Ken finished exploring the vessel with Uncle Robbie and rejoined the three women, who had settled down with coffee in the s.p.a.cious forward saloon, the ferryboat had come to the end of the protected waters of West Loch Tarbert and entered the rough open sea. The deck began to tilt in an alarming fashion, huge waves rolled past like gray mountains on the march, and the Scottish mist changed to heavy rain that splattered the saloon windows as though a giant hose had been turned on.

Ken thought that was exciting. "Maybe this big old tub will sink, and we'll get to ride in the lifeboats!"

"The ferry will not sink," Mummie said firmly. "Don't be ridiculous, Kenneth."

Dee was terrified that her older brother might be right. Gripping the arm of a seat to keep from losing her balance, she felt her stomach give an ominous leap. She took a deep breath and commanded it to stop that. No one must suspect how frightened she was!

Ken asked how long the trip would take. "Only two hours," said Robert Strachan. "It's about fifty kloms from the terminal at Kennacraig to Port Askaig on the eastern sh.o.r.e of Islay where we'll be landing."

"I hope the rain lets up soon," Rowan Grant murmured. Like her husband, she wore a rain-resistant grintlaskin sportsuit. Hers was wine-colored and his was royal blue with white stripes up the arms and legs. Pet.i.te Viola Strachan was more elegantly dressed in gray woolen slacks, a black silk blouse, and a repelvel Burberry.

"The forecast promises fair skies by this afternoon," said Masha.

"I still wish we'd gone to the Elizabethan Immersive Pageant," Ken said. But his mother cut him off, handing him a credit card.

"That's quite enough, Kenneth. You and Dody may go and get something to eat if you wish. Or find someplace to sit and read the guide-plaques you brought We grownups have some academic matters to discuss in private."

"Oh, boy! Food! Come on, Dee!"

Ken went lurching off happily, but Dee felt much too queasy to eat. Her stomach was not obeying her order to behave itself and she was becoming dizzy as well. Fortunately, Mummie and the others never noticed her distress. She was very glad of that It would be inconsiderate to bother them when they wanted to talk about really important things. While her brother headed for the ferry snack bar, she crept away to the other side of the pa.s.senger saloon and huddled alone in a leather seat. She had with her a small plaque with two book flecks installed, one a descriptive guide of the island and the other ent.i.tled Birds in Islay, with an electronic notebook for entering species observed. She loved birds, especially the bold merlins and kestrels and peregrines that were common in the countryside around Edinburgh. Gran Masha had said that they might catch sight of a sea eagle on Islay, and there would surely be many other interesting birds to look at-razorbills, puffins, and fierce skuas.

A few gulls accompanied the ferryboat now, dodging easily among the enormous ocean swells, but Dee felt too ill to look in her book and identify them. She had never seen such monstrous waves, like heaving crags streaked with foam. At first she waited, stiff with dread, for one of them to crash down on the boat and kill them all, praying to her guardian angel to take her to heaven when she died. But none of the big waves ever broke over the rail. The ferry rolled and wallowed and creaked, but it kept pounding st.u.r.dily onward, miraculously immune from being swamped, while the jaunty birds soared alongside and Dee felt more and more dazed and miserable.

I'll die, she thought. Or even worse-I'll spit up my breakfast and everyone will call me a baby! Oh, angel, help me.

She clung to the chair-arms with white-knuckled hands. There was a sour taste in her throat and the giddiness was getting worse.

I won't throw up! I won't! I won't ...

Ken was suddenly there, holding a gla.s.s of ginger beer. "Gran Masha says this'll help calm your stomach." He held out the drink.

"My-my stomach is fine," she mumbled mulishly. Only troublesome children complained.

"Come on. Take it. You must be broadcasting subliminal barf-vibes. Those three Gi sitting over there came twittering to Mummie and said that her poor darling little girl was getting ready to toss her cookies. Gran called me on my wrist-com and told me to bring you this."

On the far side of the saloon, near where Mummie and the others sat, engrossed in telepathic conversation, the trio of friendly longnecked nonhumans waved their silly feathered arms at Dee and whooped and simpered.

Chagrin at being betrayed darkened the girl's eyes. "It's none of their business how I feel. The hateful snoopy-minded things."

"Gi are supersensitive to emotions. You're probably making them feel like woofing their custard, too. Come on, drink this."

Ken was two years older than Dee. The lank hair falling over his brow was the color of oatmeal porridge, and his brown eyes seemed too large for his waxen, fine-featured face. He wore corduroy trousers tucked into Nesna lobben-boots and a thick Fair Isle sweater. He had left his tan anorak with the grownups.

Dee took tiny sips of the spicy, bubbling ginger beer, but it only seemed to make the nausea worse. Any minute now, she was surely going to vomit and disgrace herself. "If only the boat would stop tipping from side to side," she moaned. "Then I'd be all right."

"You think this is bad?" Ken gestured at the rampaging sea. "You'd feel a million times worse if you were on a starship popping in and out of hypers.p.a.ce. You probably don't remember, but Mum says you squalled like a piglet during every limbo-leap on the trip from Caledonia to Earth."

"I was only a little baby then. And I bet you cried twice as much, you rotten old dumb doofus!"

Ken shrugged and flashed a gap-toothed grin. "Look," he said kindly. "I read about motion sickness. It's all in your head. Your inner ear is sending wrongo signals to your brainstem's upchuck switch because it thinks you're off-balance and not in control of your environment. What you gotta do is show the brain that you are still in control. Take a good gargle of your beer and redact the pukes away."

"I can't," she sobbed miserably. "I already tried. You know my mindpowers are no good."

Ken bent closer. "That's not true. We've both got really strong powers even if we're latent, and sometimes they can be used if we really need them. Especially redacting-the healing power. Try hard. I did once and it worked for me."

Dee stared at him through bleared, skeptical eyes.

"When I was really small," he continued, "I used to wheeze and pant all the time. It was a thing called asthma. Sometimes I could hardly breathe. Do you remember?"

Dee shook her head listlessly.

"I didn't think you would. I got it just after we first came to Earth. I took medicine and a Master Redactor tried to cure me, but it didn't help much. The doctor said something deep inside my mind was causing it. The asthma was really bad. I couldn't run or play ball or anything without losing my breath. Then one night when I was about your age I woke up all of a sudden feeling like I was strangling. I couldn't breathe at all. My eyes were popping out of my head and I saw all sorts of spinning crazy lights and I kicked and tried to yell and no sound came."

"And then what?"

"I started to die."

Dee felt her chest constrict. She discovered that she was holding her own breath, w.i.l.l.y-nilly. For a moment, her churning stomach was almost forgotten. "How did you know?"

Ken was whispering. "I stopped hurting and choking and I went floating up like a kite. I could still see me down below in my bed thrashing around and turning blue, but-I really wasn't there. I was going away to die. It felt soooo good! ... But then I remembered that Uncle Robbie was taking me to a grownup rugger game the next day, and I decided I didn't want to die after all. I got mad and I told myself, Cut that out! You can breathe if you really want to. No more of this stupid asthma s.h.i.t. No more!"