Galactic Milieu - Diamond Mask Part 8

I am newborn. Inevitably.

What do you want?

All of you. I require a.s.sistance. And I'll take you to start with. Silly, flawed old Rogi! But you'll be useful ...

I knew in a lightning stroke of insight that it was a demon, a mind-devourer conjured somehow by the dying Victor. It didn't get me because the Family Ghost saved my pathetic a.s.s, telling Fury to do what it had to do, but not with me. In the dream, or vision, or whatever the h.e.l.l it was, I clung to a gigantic simulacrum of the key-ring charm that I call the Great Carbuncle and was towed back to reality.

Where I discovered that Victor was dead.

The Dynasty and Denis and I were all safe, and so was baby Marc, Paul's son, who had been left in an adjacent room with a nurse.

Victor's body was cremated, and on Easter Monday of the year 2040 Denis went to Anticosti Starport and handed a leaden box containing the compacted ashes to the captain of the CSS Saul Minionman, outward bound to the planet a.s.sawompsett. Before the stars.h.i.+p left our solar system, the captain launched the remains of Victor Remillard on an impact trajectory into the sun.

That seemed to be that ... until Fury's creature, the Hydra, fed for the first time in 2051, and it seemed that Vic had somehow been reborn.

Brett Doyle McAllister, Catherine Remillard's husband, was Hydra's first victim. His body was hideously charred, and along the spine and on the head were seven peculiar ashen patches like intricately drawn wheels or flowers: chakra symbols. In Kundalini Yoga the chakras are subtle force-centers that are intimately connected to the vital lattices infusing the human body. But what had been done to Brett had no basis in pranic healing or any other ancient discipline; it was instead a kind of metapsychic vampirism that only one person was ever known to have used before.

Victor.

In 2013 I was an eyewitness when he murdered Shannon O'Connor, whose body was branded like Brett's. Hours later, Shannon's villainous father, Kieran O'Connor, was killed in an identical manner when he tried to foil Vic's plans on the night of the Great Intervention. Only a handful of people, all nonoperant save for Denis and me, ever realized that Vic had killed O'Connor and his daughter in a completely unique manner, by draining their lifeforce through the chakra points.

When Brett McAllister was murdered in the same way, Victor had been dead for eleven years.

Hydra, Fury's agent, was to remain nameless for some time to come; but the next action that could be directly attributed to Brett McAllister's killer was an attempt on the life of Margaret Strayhorn, the wife of the famous metapsychic scholar and politician Davy MacGregor. She was attacked later that same year, 2051, while attending a dinner party at the home of Dartmouth College's president, Tom Spotted Owl. Margaret survived the a.s.sault, but a single distinctive chakra burn on top of her head linked her a.s.sailant to that of Brett.

Two months later, Margaret Strayhorn disappeared from her apartment in Concilium Orb, the administrative center of the Galactic Milieu, apparently a suicide. There was only a single clue that hinted at murder: her farspoken cry, Five, which her husband perceived at the moment of her death. Davy MacGregor was convinced that whoever had attacked Margaret before had finally managed to kill her and destroy her body completely.

On the face of it, there was no obvious motive for either murder. However, Brett McAllister had managed to convince his wife Catherine Remillard to turn down her nomination to the Galactic Concilium shortly before he was slain, and the family had been extremely disappointed. With Brett dead, Cat decided to accept. This, together with certain other suspicious circ.u.mstances, led the Magistratum to conjecture that a criminally ambitious Remillard might have murdered Cat's husband.

The entire Dynasty, plus thirteen-year-old Marc, underwent rigorous mental probing by a Krondaku-Simbiari forensic team. The family all seemed to be exonerated; but the exotic officials had already begun to suspect that the seven adult Remillard siblings and Marc-and perhaps other powerful human metas as well-were able to screen their innermost thoughts from the usual kinds of coercive-redactive interrogation used by the Magistratum, thereby avoiding self-incrimination.

At that time, the Human Polity was still under probation and had not yet been admitted to full citizens.h.i.+p in the Galactic Milieu. The suspicion that Earthlings might be able to circ.u.mvent the justice system of the Milieu-plus the possibility that our planet's most famous and powerful metapsychic family might harbor a mental Dracula-was enough to cause some of the exotic Concilium members to demand that the Great Intervention be nullified and all humanity quarantined forthwith, with interstellar travel permanently prohibited.

There had been serious opposition to letting us join the Milieu in the first place. We Earthlings were considered to be a mentally immature and barbaric lot, and only a summary veto by the almighty Lylmik Supervisors had prevented our world from being pa.s.sed by. The Fury-Hydra hullabaloo brought the old objections to the fore once again, and once again the Lylmik saved our bacon. They insisted that the induction of humanity into the Milieu proceed as scheduled. Furthermore, no action was to be taken against any Remillard unless there was ironclad proof of criminal activity.

One possible motive for Margaret Strayhorn's murder, even more tenuous than that advanced for Brett's, also seemed to point the finger at the Dynasty. Margaret's husband Davy MacGregor was the only serious opponent to Paul Remillard in the election contest for First Magnate of the Human Polity. A widower who had taken thirty years to recover from his first bereavement, Davy had recently discovered that his dearly loved second wife was carrying their child. Her death might have been expected to cause Davy's emotional breakdown and the withdrawal of his candidacy, leaving the field wide open for Paul. Instead, Davy held up adamantly after Margaret's murder and vowed to track down her killer.

MacGregor narrowly lost the election and Paul became First Magnate; but Davy was appointed Planetary Dirigent of Earth, and took advantage of his august position to reopen the stalled investigation of the Dynasty. He acquired a fair amount of d.a.m.ning evidence by coercing me six ways to Sunday.

I was forced to tell him about my first encounter in 2040 with the monster called Fury. I told him how the same malignant ent.i.ty seemed to show up at the birth of Jon Remillard in 2052, apparently hoping to devour the prodigious newborn mind before being thwarted somehow by me.

I told him how five other metas-including Adrien Remillard's oldest daughter Adrienne-had mysteriously disappeared during that same summer in the immediate vicinity of the family beach house on the Atlantic coast. The girl's death and the presence of seven chakras on her incinerated body had actually been perceived metapsychically by baby Jack as the murder was committed. The naive infant, not realizing what he had witnessed, described Addie's a.s.sailants to his brother Marc as "a Hydra" controlled by "Fury." Ti-Jean was otherwise unable to identify the perpetrators and poor Addie's remains were never found.

Paul Remillard now deduced that Margaret Strayhorn's dying thought, Five, referred to the number of minds that had combined in pernicious metaconcert to form Hydra; but it seemed quite incredible that five members of the Dynasty-six, if you counted Fury-were killers somehow possessed by Victor's demoniac pa.s.sion.

Paul was torn between his innate desire to see justice done and his fear that the Human Polity might be expelled from the Galactic Milieu because members of his family, the most powerful human minds in the galaxy, were possibly criminal lunatics. I confessed to Davy MacGregor how Paul finally allowed Addie's death to be attributed to sharks, as the four earlier disappearances of operants had been. There was no corroborating proof, after all, that little Jack's appalling vision had been anything except infantile fantasy, no proof that ent.i.ties called Fury and Hydra existed at all.

Nevertheless, in his heart Paul remained convinced that Fury and Hydra were real-and somehow intimately connected to the Dynasty.

My evidence, even though given under duress, supplied Dirigent MacGregor with legal grounds for a new interrogation of the Remillards, this time utilizing the recently invented Cambridge mechanical mind-probe, a horrendous piece of equipment that the Spanish Inquisition would have awarded five stars in the agony category. It was supposed to reveal the infallible truth when yes-or-no questions were posed to the examinees. The Dynasty and their spouses, Denis, his wife Lucille, and young Marc were all hooked to the machine and asked the following questions:

1.Are you the ent.i.ty called Fury?

2.Do you know who or what Fury is?

3.Are you the ent.i.ty called Hydra, or a part of that ent.i.ty?

4.Do you know who Hydra is?

5.Do you know who or what killed Brett McAllister?

6. Do you know who or what killed Margaret Strayhorn?

7. Do you know who or what killed Adrienne Remillard?

8.Do you know who or what killed the four operants who disappeared in the vicinity of the New Hamps.h.i.+re sea-coast last summer?

9.Do you know for a fact that Victor Remillard is alive?

10. Do you suspect that the Fury-Hydra murders of McAllister, Strayhorn, Adrienne Remillard, and the others have some connection to the Remillard family?

Everyone answered "No" to the first nine questions and the machine affirmed that they told the truth. All of the Dynasty wives answered "No" to the tenth question and told the truth. Lucille Cartier said "No" to the tenth question and lied. Denis Remillard, his seven adult children, and young Marc answered "Yes" to the tenth question and told the truth.

Davy MacGregor asked the Lylmik Supervisors to rule upon whether or not the results of the questioning gave him grounds to continue his investigation of the Dynasty. The Lylmik decreed that they did not. Because the interrogation had been done confidentially, according to the discretion of the Dirigent, no record of it was released to the media or the Human Magistratum. The Galactic Magistratum in Orb did retain a file, however, and the fact of Fury and Hydra's existence soon became the worst-kept secret among influential metas of the Human Polity-including the then-clandestine group of Magnates of the Concilium and other respected operants who would form the nucleus of the Metapsychic Rebellion in 2084.

The Rebels were the first to speculate that Fury, controller of the Hydra a.s.sa.s.sin, might be a Remillard suffering from a malignant multiple-personality disorder, possibly triggered by some deathbed mental contact with the evil Victor. His or her "normal" persona would have no inkling that a deviant Fury aspect also existed, and this meant that Fury could never be exposed by any conventional form of mental interrogation. Only a probing of the deep unconscious-a tricky and often inconclusive procedure where Grand Master metapsychics were concerned-might manage to ferret the monster out.

No one expected the Remillards to volunteer for further mental examination very soon.

The next a.s.sault by Hydra was not prompted by Fury at all, but by the jealousy of the creature itself. Earlier, Hydra had suspected that Fury was seeking ways to incorporate the powerful mind of young Marc Remillard into its mysterious grand scheme. Hydra sought to prevent being overshadowed by trying to destroy Marc, in defiance of Fury's orders. Hydra botched the job, but it was ready to try again in 2054, when Marc had just turned sixteen. Once again Marc survived ... but this time one unit of Hydra's multiplex mind died. Fury was in a towering rage at its creature's stupidity and had to initiate drastic damage control.

Events now rushed to a climax. At first only Marc, Ti-Jean, and I knew why Gordon McAllister, the fourteen-year-old son of Catherine Remillard and her late husband Brett, had tried to murder his cousin Marc. But the boys and I mistakenly believed that Gordon alone was Hydra.

Fury decided that we three had to die, so that the surviving Hydra-units and the monster itself would not be exposed. I was to be eliminated first. But I was saved in spite of myself, discovering in the process that the other heads of Hydra included four other children: Celine Remillard, daughter of Maurice; Quentin Remillard, son of Severin; Parnell Remillard, son of Adrien; and Madeleine Remillard, daughter of Paul, and Marc's own younger sister. They were all fourteen years old. Later we deduced that the Hydra-children had been in utero as their mothers prayed around the deathbed of Victor in the year 2040. Somehow, as the family's most flagrant black sheep expired, he had been able to tempt those intelligent, precocious fetuses-and win them for his successor, Fury.

Escaping from Hydra's attack with a little help from a friend, I rushed to help Marc save baby Jack, who was confined to the Dartmouth Medical School's. .h.i.tchc.o.c.k Hospital with (as we then believed) terminal cancer. But Fury got there ahead of us and set Ti-Jean's room on fire. The miracle of the child's rescue was described in the previous volume of my memoirs.

The four youngsters who comprised the Hydra had disappeared, but by their brazen attack on me, they had given themselves away as homicidal cat's-paws. The Dirigent of Earth and the Galactic Magistratum conducted intensive investigations after the Hydra-children's ident.i.ties were discovered, hoping to unmask Fury. Because the Lylmik insisted upon keeping the reputations of the Remillard magnates unsullied until indisputable proof of criminal activity was obtained, everything was handled with exquisite discretion. As far as the media were concerned, the attack on Marc by Gordon McAllister was an act of adolescent insanity, and the fire in Jack's hospital room was an unfortunate accident that had a gloriously happy ending.

But behind closed doors, all of us Remillards-including me, but not the newly reincarnated Ti-Jean, who was too young to endure the trauma-were subjected to interrogation conducted by the Milieu's premier mind-reamer, Evaluator Throma'eloo Lek. By coincidence, this official had also put Marc to the question back in the days when the boy was suspected of having drowned me and his mother.

No fresh data were obtained as a result of the Evaluator's best efforts. We all checked out innocent as lambs. The Hydra-children had apparently vanished off the face of the Earth-and there was no trace of them on any other Milieu world, either. This meant that they were dead ... or that by some unimaginable virtuoso maneuver Fury had managed to alter the mental signature-the unique brain-pattern that is registered at the birth of each operant child-of its four young minions. Backtracking, the investigators learned that the Hydra-units had indeed been in the vicinity of each chakra murder and attempted murder. But no adult Remillard could be similarly placed at every single crime scene, so none could be pinned positively with the Fury label. This did not prove their innocence, however. Not if the monster really was a family member with a split personality.

In the end, there was nothing Davy MacGregor and the Magistratum could do but abandon the investigation. Neither Fury nor the Hydra were heard from again until eight years had pa.s.sed, and even then they might have escaped notice had it not been for Evaluator Throma'eloo Lek and little Dorothea Macdonald.

Fury had made an excellent choice when it decided to hide its creature on Islay in the Scottish Hebrides. By the mid twenty-first century the island had only about four thousand permanent inhabitants. Because of the Milieu's social policy of compelling the best and brightest of humanity (especially those with metafaculties) to achieve their highest potential, only a handful of elderly, invalid, and intransigent metas were allowed to continue living on the remote island. Every one of these possible threats to Hydra's security died conveniently of "natural causes" not long after the fourfold creature took up residence on Islay. The possibility of meta babies being born to normals remained, especially since so many of Islay's inhabitants had Celtic genes. (This meant that an exceptionally large percentage of the population were promising latents with unlimited reproductive licenses who might be expected to engender operant offspring.) But here again Milieu law inadvertently kept the island free of operant residents who might detect the creature. Since there was no metapsychic preceptorial facility on Islay, normal parents with meta newborns were obliged either to move to the mainland in order to live near such a school or else give up their children to operant foster care. This particular aspect of the hated Reproductive Statutes remained on the books even after the Human Polity achieved full Milieu citizens.h.i.+p, and it served Fury's purposes well. While thousands of meta tourists visited picturesque Islay each year, none stayed long enough to detect the anomalous aura of the Hydra.

Details of the creature's covert years on the island, and of the crimes perpetrated by the Hydra while it lived there, were revealed piecemeal during the intensive investigation into the deaths of Viola Strachan, Robert Strachan, and Rowan Grant. The Magistratum was able to determine from residual DNA traces and circ.u.mstantial evidence that the four Hydra fugitives had resided at Sanaigmore Farm ever since they fled New Hamps.h.i.+re. The young quartet officially took up residence on Islay in mid-2054, although it was probable that they had occupied the supposedly vacant farmhouse for some months before that. Sanaigmore was purchased in June of that year on behalf of the Eumenides Corporation of Elysium by one Frederick Urquhart Ramsay Young, a man of unmemorable appearance who represented himself to the local authorities as an interstellar export-import entrepreneur. That the acronymous Citizen Young was filthy rich became evident after he contracted for the extensive renovation of the isolated old farmstead, turning it into a handsome country residence with all mod cons and then some, including an independent power supply and a satellite uplink.

The youngsters, who had a.s.sumed the names Celia and Magdala MacKendal and John and Arthur Quentin, were alleged to be two sets of nonoperant orphaned siblings with mild mental and physical disabilities. They were the wards of the above-mentioned F. U. R. Young, their maternal Uncle Fred. Their caregivers included a governess-therapist named Philippa Ogilvie (also of eminently forgettable appearance) and a pair of close-mouthed locals, Rod and Judith Campbell, who functioned as live-in cook-housekeeper and man-of-all-work until their "accidental death" in a fiery groundcar wreck five years later.

No merchant, contractor, day laborer, repair person, regional official, or other Islay citizen ever saw Uncle Fred or Ms. Ogilvie together, nor were any photos, digital likenesses, fingerprints, mindprint IDs, or genetic material of theirs ever tracked down. All known details of their background, including their names, were later found to be fict.i.tious. Scores of witnesses claimed to have seen them and dealt with them during various business transactions, but no one could give a distinctive description of either one. It was as though they were ghosts, drab and instantly forgettable, who went abroad in daylight, performed certain mundane operations, then reentered the oblivion from which they had sprung.

Magistratum investigators speculated that the Fury persona itself might have played both roles using "sendings," psychocreative simulacra projected from a distant locale, when it seemed desirable to demonstrate that the four orphaned adolescents did indeed have adult protectors. From what I myself learned later about Fury's activities, I can affirm that the monster never physically set foot on Islay; but whether Young and Ogilvie were living dupes later disposed of by Fury or only illusions is anyone's guess.

Frederick Young made only sporadic visits to the children and the farm after the new household settled in, since his business supposedly required him to travel to the human colonies of the Milieu. On his rare sojourns in Islay he sometimes took the four youngsters out for dinner at one of the fine hotel restaurants that catered to tourists, or went walking with them in the wild moors of the uninhabited northern parts of the island. The extended family would exchange polite greetings with any birdwatcher, botanist, or cross-country stroller they chanced to meet. Sometimes the family would walk on ... and at other times, if circ.u.mstances were propitious, it evidently paused to feed.

Now and again Uncle Fred would drop into a pub in Bowmore, sipping a dram of Islay's finest and keeping himself to himself, except for a bit of inconsequential chitchat. No one ever suspected he was not what he appeared to be. No one seems to have thought very much about him at all-not even when suboperant island residents began to disappear and rumors of the Kilnave Fiend resurfaced after a hiatus of nearly two hundred years.

The Ogilvie woman was even more shadowy than Young, coming into Bowmore to shop only every two weeks and declining every overture from friendly local folks eager to recruit her into political, social, or charitable groups. Any busybodies bold enough to come knocking on the door at Sanaigmore were invariably confronted by one of the surly Campbells and told that "Miss Pippa and the young people are at study" and not to be disturbed under any circ.u.mstances.

For the first two years of their stay on Islay, the Hydra-children were schooled at home by a series of private tutors, each with impeccable credentials in a wide variety of academic disciplines. One of the farm outbuildings had been converted into an elaborately appointed schoolhouse, complete with laboratory and shop facilities. A fine gymnasium, a game room, a handball court, and a heated swimming pool had been tucked within the sh.e.l.l of the old barn. The educators, all nonoperant, were mostly recruited from mainland Britain and paid exorbitant salaries to compensate for their tour of duty in the lonely Hebrides. They would drive to the farm each schoolday, work with the four youngsters, then drive back to their lodgings in Bridgend or Bowmore or one of the other south-sh.o.r.e villages when cla.s.ses were over. They rarely saw Ms. Ogilvie and almost never encountered Uncle Fred-except when they were hired or dismissed.

The tutors never suspected that their unusual students were metapsychic operants with exceptionally powerful coercive and creative abilities. The psychologically astute did note the atmosphere of profound s.e.xual tension that seemed to prevail among the young people, and some of the more susceptible teachers found themselves hopelessly smitten by one or another of their charges-but to no avail. The Hydra-children had no casual affairs with their teachers or with any other residents of Islay who lived to tell about it, nor did they socialize with the islanders, except in the most perfunctory way.

When the children attained their majority at age sixteen they were legally free to dispense with home tutoring. They set about to acquire their higher education working independently at four different inst.i.tutions via satellite, never leaving their island of exile.

While the former tutors' later testimony to the Magistratum proved virtually useless as a source of information about the mysterious governess or the children's skittish guardian, it did provide valuable insight into the developing characters of the four Hydras themselves.

Magdala MacKendal (a.k.a. Madeleine Remillard, the third child of Paul and Teresa and Marc's younger sister) was the most brilliant of the quartet, and the only one with whom I was more than casually acquainted during the pre-Islay years. (The total offspring of the Dynasty numbered forty, and at family gatherings they tended to blend into an amorphous rainbow-auraed mob.) I remember Maddy as a calculating minois-a pretty little thing-who was tactfully compliant to Marc and her bossy older sister Marie, but often inconsiderate and even cruel to her brother Luc, who was a year younger and a rather shy and sickly child at that time. When baby Jack arrived, Maddy took an unusual interest in him and spent a lot of time ingratiating herself. In hindsight, she was probably attempting to bring Jack into Fury's...o...b..t-a futile enterprise that the monster seems to have abandoned once Ti-Jean was diagnosed as having cancer. With her ebony hair, compelling blue eyes, and pale perfect complexion, Madeleine Remillard grew up to be a stunner by any standard, and-according to one wistful jobbing pedagogue, who didn't realize how lucky he'd been to escape with his goolies intact-she was as distant and cold as the aurora borealis, while at the same time reminding him of a barely dormant volcano. She later graduated summa c.u.m laude from Harvard's home-study division and earned an advanced degree in Milieu law.

John Quentin (Quint Remillard, youngest son of Severin by his third wife Maeve O'Neill) was characterized by his teachers as an amoral charmer with blond curls and carnivorous eyes. Although not quite as talented as his first cousin Maddy, Quint easily managed degrees in psychophysics and philosophy from Cambridge's Open University branch.

Celia MacKendal (Celine, Maurice Remillard's fourth child and the firstborn of Cecilia Ashe) struck all of her tutors as mentally disturbed, for all that she was wanly pretty and winsome as a porcelain figurine, with hair the color of clover honey and darting, evasive turquoise eyes. Her manner was superficially prim, almost timid, and the tutors claimed that she suffered wildly fluctuating mood swings, lapses of memory, and other evidences of mental instability. Celine had once been discovered by a scandalized science instructor naked as a jaybird in the high meadow adjacent to the farmhouse, apparently having blatantly satisfying sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic s.e.xual congress with an invisible being. The instructor was promptly discharged, but he received a consoling bonus and kept his mouth shut until the Magistratum interview. Celine's college work was mediocre except in metapsychology, and she got a satellite-study B.A. sheepskin from Stanford in California.

Arthur Quentin (Parnell, son of Adrien Remillard and co-murderer of his older sister Adrienne) was apparently the low head on the Hydra totem pole. His teachers characterized him frankly as a lout, and he barely sc.r.a.ped a nanotech engineering degree from the Extension Division of Tirane Polytechnic. In young manhood Parni had the tall, burly physique and dark hair of his cousin Marc; but where Marc's body was ma.s.sively elegant, Parni's was brutish. When Dorothee showed me his memorecalled image years later, he reminded me of that cla.s.sic stereotype, the raging, bearlike Canuck brawler who would duke it out with Sergeant Preston of the Mounties at the climax of the antique television show. His role in the Hydra metaconcert was mental muscle, not subtlety, and he was an insatiable gobbler of lifeforce as well as the designated reality-partner in Celine's demented s.e.xual romps.

When the young Hydras were about eighteen, their governess was seen less and less frequently in town and the young people began to do the shopping and deal with all the other household affairs on their own. The two Campbells died during the following year and were not replaced. Ms. Ogilvie was said to have left to take another position shortly thereafter. Uncle Fred also made fewer and fewer appearances on Islay, and in the year 2059 a brief notice appeared in the Islay Guardian newsbase: the peripatetic businessman Frederick U. R. Young of Sanaigmore Farm and Erinys House, Elysium, had died tragically in a hotel fire on the "Russian" planet Chernozem, leaving his four wards as his only heirs.

It was expected that the bereaved young people would sell the farmhouse and move away. But to everyone's surprise they carried on as reclusively as ever.

And so did the Kilnave Fiend.

The Magistratum would eventually number the unaccounted-for victims of the Hydra on Islay at approximately twenty-nine, averaging three or four a year from the time that the Remillard children first came to the island. All ages and both s.e.xes were sacrificed to the creature's hunger for human vitality, and the victims shared only one characteristic in common: they were all suboperants, persons born with extremely strong but latent metafaculties. Most of them disappeared without a clue. Only in three of the earliest cases were peculiar areas of scorched earth or rock discovered, together with DNA traces and bits of burnt clothing belonging to the missing persons.

These circ.u.mstances had prompted tales of the resurrected Kilnave Fiend. The amused Hydra decided to reinforce the legend, and from time to time island children or other susceptibly imaginative persons caught glimpses of a weird, dwarfish person lurking about in lonely places.

The local police dismissed the Fiend sightings as tosh and taradiddle. But in spite of their best efforts at the time, the disappearances remained unsolved until the deaths of the three Edinburgh researchers brought in the full resources of the Galactic Magistratum and the First Magnate of the Human Polity.

However, the homicide suspects were not then or ever identified publicly as Remillards. Once again the Lylmik Supervisors acted to protect the reputation of Paul and the other distinguished members of Humanity's First Family of Metapsychics. This chronicle of mine is the first to reveal the truth.

Professor Masha MacGregor-Gawrys underwent rigorous conventional mind-probing following the three deaths and she also freely submitted to testing with the Cambridge machine. The princ.i.p.al objective of the examining authorities was to determine whether there had been a significant motive for the latest killings, or whether the victims had been only casually slain by the Hydra, in the manner of the luckless Islay suboperants who had preceded them.

Nothing in Masha's mind indicated that the triple slaying was anything but coincidental. It was troubling to Paul Remillard that she seemed to believe that the dead researchers had been working on a CE operator safety study that was expected to show severely negative conclusions-when examination of their encrypted raw data files at Edinburgh University demonstrated that users of highly advanced cerebroenergetic equipment faced only a moderate and acceptable risk, about as much as xenoplanetologists or urban firefighters. But Masha had, after all, recently undergone rejuvenation, and six months in the regen-tank was known to induce a temporary dis...o...b..bulation even in the brain of a Grand Master. The professor herself decided in time that she was probably honestly mistaken about the research results that had been discussed by the dead trio.

Paul Remillard, however, experienced a lingering uneasiness about the subject of the Edinburgh study, although he said nothing about it to Throma'eloo Lek or the other Magistratum officials.

Little Kenneth Macdonald was questioned with the utmost gentleness by Paul himself, but the boy knew almost nothing of value, other than confirming the fact of his sister's proleptic antic.i.p.ation of mortal danger and her uncanny knowledge that Sanaigmore Farm was the source of it.

Dorothee was in a state of severe shock in the wake of the killings; but unlike her brother, she had not yet wept or manifested any other emotional outburst. The examiners realized that they would have to treat her with extreme caution if she was not to break down. She answered all verbal questions willingly, and even worked with a police computer artist to provide depictions of the two suspicious adults who had spoken to her on the ferry and introduced her to the story of the Kilnave Fiend. (The book-plaque they left behind was devoid of clues.) She also described her vivid dream of the murders and a.s.sisted the artist in producing likenesses of the third and fourth units of Hydra.

Both Paul and Throma'eloo Lek were convinced that Dorothee had not dreamed about the killings at all, but rather had experienced a rare type of symbolic excorporeal excursion-an out-of-body experience-instigated by some metacoercive impulse of her mother or the other victims. The authorities were very eager to perform an exhaustive examination of the girl's memories, not only to retrieve more details of the auras of Madeleine and Quentin, which would aid in the manhunt, but also to glean other possible clues to the murders that Dorothee might have forgotten or repressed.

Paul explained very carefully to her how important it was that they probe her mind He told her that they would give her a hypnogogic drug that would put her into a peaceful, drowsy state. She would not remember the least bit of discomfort when the procedure was over.

"Would it be like the medicine that the latency therapists use to get inside patients' minds?" the little girl asked Paul. When he conceded that the drug was similar, Dorothee reacted with unexpected vigor, refusing absolutely to permit the probe. No appeal from the First Magnate, the Krondak Evaluator, or her grandmother Masha could shake her decision.

"The doctors used that medicine on me when they tried to push their way into my mind," she said. "It hurt and it made me terribly sick."

"But this is a different medicine." Paul tried to soothe her. "I promise that it won't be painful."

"No!" The small face was adamant. "I told you everything I know." Then, displaying an amazing dignity for one so young, she a.s.serted that her mind was her own and she would allow no outsider to enter ... "except the angel."

This amazing qualification to her refusal precipitated a considerable fuss. Evaluator Throma'eloo, unfamiliar with childish human religious fantasies, feared that the putative heavenly guardian might be some kind of indwelling aspect of Fury itself. But Paul quickly reminded his monstrous colleague that no mature operant persona could take over a latent child's mind, not even the unconscious, without altering her bioenergetic aura. A very simple test showed that Dorothee's vital field, while extraordinarily complex for a nonoperant and deformed by unarticulated grief, was well within normal parameters. She was not a creature of Fury. (Whether or not an actual angel resided within the girl's mind was deemed irrelevant to the investigation, but Throma'eloo remained intrigued by the possibility.) Paul, on the other hand, was quietly furious. A stubborn five-year-old could not be allowed to impede the investigations of the Galactic Magistratum-especially in a matter touching so closely upon the Family Remillard itself. Nevertheless, little Dorothee had the First Magnate cold when she pointed out: "You can't probe my mind unless I say you can. That's the law."

It was indeed-and the only way to circ.u.mvent it was to obtain the permission of the girl's legal guardian. Professor Masha MacGregor-Gawrys would have readily agreed, but she was not Dorothee's next of kin under Milieu law.

Ian Macdonald was.

Paul had a subs.p.a.ce communicator flown to the little Bowmore police station from the Scottish mainland, for the island boasted no such amenity. The following day, with Throma'eloo Lek, the professor, and Dorothee herself present, he put in a call to the planet Caledonia. As the visage of Ian Macdonald flashed onto the screen, the little girl gave a soft cry. It was the same man who appeared in the cherished old photo her brother had found, looking older and more careworn but still handsome and very strong. Her Daddy ...

When Paul Remillard broke the news of Viola Strachan's murder Ian turned away briefly, cursing, his eyes filled with sudden tears. Then he cried out: "Who did it? What b.a.s.t.a.r.d killed Vi? ... And what the b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l is the First Magnate of the Human Polity doing telling me about it?"

"I can't discuss that with you at this time, Citizen." Paul's voice was steely. "But you may be able to help us track down the a.s.sailants. Your daughter Dorothea had an EE experience at the time of the murder and her unconscious may have retained important clues. I'm officially requesting from you, her legal guardian, permission to interrogate her with coercive-redactive techniques."

"Daddy, don't let them!" the little girl shrieked. She pushed past Paul before her grandmother could stop her and appealed to the image on the monitor. "Don't let them dig into my mind! It'll hurt! I'm afraid! I already told them everything I know!"

Ian Macdonald looked stunned, then blackly furious. "What the f.u.c.k are you trying to pull, Remillard? You want to mind-ream my little Dorrie? G.o.d d.a.m.n it, she's not even operant!

You've got a fine friggin' nerve asking my permission to torture her."

"Not at all. With the latest medications-"

"Daddy-no!" the girl wailed, and broke into wild sobs. Masha took hold of her granddaughter and pulled her out of range of the communicator's scanner, but the child continued her terrified weeping.

"We've got to have Dorothea's evidence." Paul was urgent. "Her memories may contain data vital to the investigation. The people responsible for your ex-wife's murder are serial killers who have taken the lives of scores of other persons. They may threaten the security of the Galactic Milieu itself. You've got to give us permission to probe the girl."

"I've got to give you b.u.g.g.e.r-all, Remillard. I know my rights and I know the kid's. I forbid you to ream Dorrie! Is that clear, you mealymouthed mindf.u.c.ker?"