Galactic Milieu - Diamond Mask Part 4

The ferryboat was now very close to the narrow channel between the two large islands. Some people were taking pictures or making videos, some sat in floppy canvas deck chairs that crew members had brought outside once the rain stopped, and some scanned the spectacular scenery with powered oculars. Dee stood at the rail, consulting her descriptive plaque from time to time. She was just barely tall enough to peer over the rail's top if she stood on tiptoe, looking more like a solemn miniature adult than a child of five in her red hooded anorak and new slacks woven in the somber tartan of Macdonald of the Isles.

Her continuing sense of vague disquiet about Islay could not be cured by self-redaction as the earlier seasickness had been. But she kept the uneasiness walled away inside her and there were no creepy Gi about to betray her private feelings, only humans out there with her on the windy, swiftly drying deck.

The ferry was traveling almost due north now, moving into the narrow strait that separated Islay from the neighboring island of Jura. The sea was nowhere near so rough as before and strengthening sunlight had turned it from dull gray-green to deep blue. The steep face of Islay rose on the left. Cliffs and skerries had creamy surf boiling around them, and the hanging glens and rounded green heights were emerging from low-hanging clouds.

Using the plaque-guidebook, Dee studied Islay's modest mountains and found out the names of the highest ones, saying them softly out loud: "Beinn Uraraidh, Beinn Bheigeir, Glas Bheinn, Beinn na Caillich, Sgorr nam Faoileann ... Boundary Mountain, Vicar's Mountain, Gray Mountain, Mount of the Old Woman, and Steep Hill of the Seagulls."

"You p.r.o.nounce the Gaelic very well," said a man who stood at the rail a couple of meters away from her.

Unlike most of the other holidaymakers, he and the dark-haired woman beside him, who had come out on deck from the saloon a few minutes earlier, were dressed in city clothes. He wore no hat and his blond hair was wildly tousled by the wind, making a strange contrast to his crisply starched s.h.i.+rt, red silk cravat, charcoal-gray Beau Brummel suit with black velvet collar and cuffs, and s.h.i.+ning jockey boots. He smiled at Dee with the cool friendliness of a condescending cat, showing teeth that were extremely white. His nose was fine-bridged and prominent, and his eyes were the color of shadowed ice. He was a metapsychic operant, and Dee s.h.i.+vered as she felt his coercive-redactive probe sweep over her impervious mind-screen, light in its touch as a drifting spiderweb and more powerful than those of any other adults she knew. But he made no real effort to delve into her.

"Do you know," the man added, with a lordly wave of his hand, "that the Old Woman who gives that mountain its name is actually the Great G.o.ddess, who was wors.h.i.+pped by the ancient people of the island?"

"No. I didn't know that." Dee was polite. "Thank you for telling me. Some of my ancestors lived there, and that's why we've come on holiday."

"That's interesting. I have a home on Islay myself." The man looked away toward the misty hills. "You'll find there are all kinds of fascinating things to be seen. The reconstruction of Finlaggan Palace, excavations of prehistoric forts, the Kildalton Cross that dates back to the ninth century, flowering bogs and high cliffs and sea-caves alive with birds. You must be sure to visit the great cave at Bholsa! We even have a kind of demon called the Kilnave Fiend hanging about who's supposed to make people disappear-but that's just a folktale, of course."

"I'd like to hear it," Dee said, with a grave little smile. "I love stories like that. Please don't think I'd be frightened. I'm only five years old, but I'm a child prodigy and very mature for my age."

The attractive stranger burst into laughter, and his woman companion looked up from her own plaque-book, seeming to notice Dee for the first time. She was quite beautiful, and her face seemed as smooth and pale as eggsh.e.l.l, with rose-tinted lips and sapphire eyes framed by thick dark lashes and narrow arched brows. Her black hair was unusual, having auburn glints that were almost crimson. It was pulled tightly into a knot at the nape of her neck and crowned by a small scarlet turban that revealed a pointed widow's peak at her brow. She wore thigh-high black boots with red heels, and a fitted coat and short skirt that were the same brilliant scarlet color as her hat. The coat had golden b.u.t.tons and a golden Celtic brooch pinned to the shoulder. Its sleeves were pushed up to accommodate long black leather gloves.

"What's your name, little Miss Mature-for-Your-Age?" The woman was smiling, but her voice had a keen edge.

"Dorothea Mary Strachan Macdonald. And you?"

The man gave another bark of laughter, and this time Dee sensed that his amus.e.m.e.nt was not directed at her. A mental thrust stronger than any Dee had ever experienced before lanced into her mindscreen, which held firm. The woman's eyes widened momentarily and then she inclined her head, as a queen might when acknowledging another royal personage. Her voice became soft and compelling, with a lilt that made her seem to be half singing when she spoke. "I am Magdala MacKendal. and this is my husband, John Quentin."

"How do you do," said Dee. "Now may I please hear the story of the Kilnave Fiend?"

"Come sit down with me," said Magdala MacKendal, "and I'll tell it to you." Dee obediently plopped down into a canvas chair, while the man and woman sat on either side of her.

Long ago [Magdala MacKendal said] during the late 1500s, when the Lords of the Isles had fallen on hard times and had lost their sovereignty to the Kings of Scotland, there lived on Islay a wicked dwarf called the Dubh Sith, which means "the Black Fairy." He had a twisted little body and bent legs, and only his arms were strong. Black hair grew down to his eyebrows and an ugly black beard nearly covered the rest of his face, except for his pointed nose.

The Dubh Sith lived deep in the forlorn bogs and savage heaths of Kilnave Parish in the northwestern part of Islay, and people were very much afraid of him because of his frightful appearance. But he was also the best bowman on the island, and it was said that his arrows never missed their target. He eked out a living shooting swans and geese and other wildfowl, and bartered them for clothing and other things he could not make for himself.

Now in those days the Macdonalds of Islay and the MacLeans of the island of Mull were quarreling bitterly over some land on Islay that the MacLeans claimed was theirs. Big Lachlan MacLean decided one day in 1598 that the time was ripe for an invasion of his neighbors and a taking by force of what was his. A local witch heard about his plans and told him he was sure to win out-provided he didn't go on a Thursday and didn't drink from a famous well near Loch Gruinart on Islay.

Big Lachlan was not impressed by witches. He sailed to Islay on Thursday because stormy winds prevented his going on Wednesday, and he landed at Ardnave in the shallow bay of Loch Gruinart on the north sh.o.r.e. The day was hot and sultry, and as he and his army marched inland along the Kilnave track to attack the Macdonalds, Big Lachlan stopped to take a drink at the forbidden well. Not long afterward, a strange sight met his eyes. Sitting atop a rock at the pathside was a horrible-looking creature all in black, with a head of snarled hair and a face almost invisible behind a filthy beard. It was the dwarf Dubh Sith.

"Good day to you, Big Lachlan," said the little man. "I've come to offer my services, for I'm the finest bowman in Islay."

The giant chieftain of the MacLeans roared with laughter. "I'd not have such an ugly runt as you for love nor money," said he. "Now begone before I set my deerhounds on you."

The Dubh Sith melted away into the heather and bracken. Then he went by one of the secret underground ways that he knew to the place at the head of Loch Gruinart where Sir James Macdonald was waiting with his outnumbered force of defenders. The dwarf presented himself to Sir Jamie and made the same offer.

"Well, we don't have much of a chance, and you'll never get your pay if we lose," Sir Jamie said, "but I'll hire you gladly."

"Let me worry about that," said the Dubh Sith. "And now farewell, for you won't see me again until the battle's won."

The army of MacLeans now fell howling upon the Macdonalds in the marshlands of Gruinart Strand, and the fighting was fierce and b.l.o.o.d.y for there were three times as many invaders as there were defenders. Before long the Macdonalds began to notice that more and more of their enemies lay fallen with black arrows through their throats or sticking from their eyes. But never a sight of the dwarf archer did they see.

The MacLeans took note of their arrow-shot comrades, too, and word began to pa.s.s among them that the Dubh Sith was lurking invisible, killing man after man and laughing like the Devil himself. Lachlan MacLean tried vainly to rally his force, but they were now stricken with fear and reminded him how he had disregarded the witch's warnings. Many of them declared that they wanted to retreat.

Big Lachlan threw his head back and cursed the witch with ringing shouts, and cursed the Dubh Sith, and cursed his men for a pack of low cowards. But just then a black arrow came flying and pierced his throat above the steel gorget, and he crashed to the ground stone-dead near a hawthorn all covered with milk-white blossoms.

Suddenly, a small shape leapt out of the thorn tree, shrieking with glee, and began capering around the fallen chief. It was the Dubh Sith who had killed Big Lachlan MacLean, as well as scores of his men, by shooting them from his hiding place among the white flowering branches.

When they saw the enemy chief fall, the Macdonalds took heart and shouted their battle cry and fought with fresh vigor. By the end of the day the marsh was heaped with three hundred MacLean bodies, and the invaders knew that they were beaten.

They took up their wounded and began to flee back along the Kilnave track, toward the place where they had left their boats. Then a great storm broke and rain poured down in torrents. A crowd of MacLeans took shelter in the ancient church of St. Nave on the seash.o.r.e, but the Dubh Sith, who had followed the fugitive army through his secret underground tunnels, found out where they were hiding. He soaked rags in seal oil, tied these to his arrows, set the oil alight, then shot dozens of flaming missiles onto the wood-and-thatch church roof.

In spite of the rain the roof blazed up, and the Dubh Sith danced about madly while the trapped MacLeans burned to death in the sacred building.

Now some of the victorious Macdonalds came on the scene, and they were horrified and disgusted at what the wicked dwarf had done.

"Pay me!" the Dubh Sith cried. "Pay me my weight in gold! For I slew Big Lachlan MacLean and sixty-three of his best fighters with my black arrows, and I have made a merry bonfire of this lot!"

"You are no ally of Clan Donald," the leader of the Islaymen said. "You have desecrated a holy church through wanton murder and you are fit only for the company of the Foul Fiend, Satan himself. You shall receive your payment for tonight's work in h.e.l.l."

The two strongest Macdonald men seized the Dubh Sith by his arms and legs and began to swing him back and forth, for they intended to fling him into the inferno. "If I burn, then so shall ye," cried the dwarf. "So shall ye all!"

The Macdonalds gave a mighty heave and sent him flying through a window into the blazing church, and he uttered one last terrible cry before he disappeared into the roaring flames.

But that was not the end of the Dubh Sith.

From time to time during the past four hundred and fifty years, people walking or riding in the lonely northern places of Islay have caught glimpses of a small, scuttling black figure. They came to call it the Kilnave Fiend, for very often after it was seen a person would disappear, and later a body would be found, burnt to a cinder.

There are those who put the blame for those awful deaths on lightning, while others believe that the Dubh Sith himself is responsible. They say that his ghost still prowls the bogs and moors of the island, and he pops in and out of the secret tunnels and caves that only he knows, laughing and taking his terrible revenge.

"Dee? Are you asleep? Wake up! The ferry's almost ready to dock."

She opened her eyes and saw Ken. Only Ken, standing over the deck chair she lay in, looking down at her with a condescending big-brotherly smirk.

Slowly, she pulled herself to her feet and stretched. Had she really fallen asleep? It seemed that the melodious coercive voice of the woman named Magdala MacKendal still echoed in her ears. She remembered the vivid scenes her imagination-or something-had conjured up to accompany the story: the marshy battleground, the fighters in their breastplates and helmets, Lachlan MacLean bareheaded and gigantic, urging his men on, the flowery thorn tree with the hideous dwarf leaping out of it, the stormy night and the flaming church ...

She still felt unaccountably uneasy, even though the tale of the Kilnave Fiend was really rather tame when compared to Frankenstein or Aliens or Moon of the Undead or some of the other cla.s.sic horror shows she had seen on the Tri-D.

The ferryboat was pulling into its berth at Port Askaig, a steep little town with quaint whitewashed stone buildings and a great number of flower beds. Dee looked about the deck, but none of the women who now crowded the rail wore an elegant scarlet outfit, and none of the men were tall and blond and dressed in a gray Beau Brummel suit.

"Come on," Ken said. "They're waiting for us." He gestured to the deck beside the canvas chair. "And don't forget your book-plaques."

Dee looked down in surprise. The small plaque was hers, of course, but the other was probably the one the dark-haired woman had been reading. Its t.i.tle was Folktales and Fairy Lore of Islay and the Inner Hebrides. When Dee touched the corner activator she discovered that the book was handsomely ill.u.s.trated in full color.

In the table of contents she found "The Kilnave Fiend at the Battle of Gruinart." When she called up the story and swiftly scanned it, she saw that the pictures exactly matched those she had "dreamed."

The ferryboat hooted.

"Come on!" said Ken.

Dee tucked both plaques into the kangaroo pouch of her anorak as she followed Ken back inside the pa.s.senger saloon. Perhaps she would see Magdala MacKendal again sometime during the holiday weekend, and she would be able to return the book.

4.

FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD.

She was called by so many different names . . . And that, too, was part of her mask.

Dorothea Mary Strachan Macdonald was christened in the year 2057 at the tiny chapel of St. Margaret the Queen in Grampian Town on the continent of Beinn Bhiorach on the planet Caledonia, the first "Scottish" ethnic colony. Her mother, the operant psychophysicist Viola Strachan, called her baby girl by the nickname of Dody. So did the monster known as Fury, in its later attempts to intimidate and destroy her.

Her father, Ian Macdonald, called her Dorrie, a name that she did not like very much because (she told me years later) it seemed as though it properly belonged to a pretty little doll-faced girl with golden ringlets and melting eyes who was the apple of her doting Daddy's eye.

But her hair was an unexceptional brown, and her face was plain but pleasingly heart-shaped. While her eyes were an interesting hazel color, they were also close-set, piercing, and disconcerting-and they did not weep easily, nor did they readily reveal the secrets of the mind behind them. Her troubled father Ian did undoubtedly love her in his fas.h.i.+on, but the little girl finally realized that he would much rather have had a brawny second son who would have a.s.suaged his disappointment over Kenneth. Even worse, she had hidden within her tremendous mental faculties that Ian feared ... almost as much as she feared them herself.

Her beloved older brother Ken called her Dee, and this was also the first name she called herself, because it could have belonged to either a male or a female-or even to something that was not a person at all. Janet Finlay, Ian Macdonald's crusty factotum, called her Doro. The nonborn fosterlings and the hired hands at the family airfarm teased her by calling her Dodo in her early years, when her mindpowers were still mostly latent. Much later they would respectfully style her Dirigent, after she a.s.sumed the metapsychic leaders.h.i.+p of Caledonia.

Her grandmother, the colorful Rebel stalwart Masha MacGregor-Gawrys, never called her anything except Dorothea.

To the awesome Lylmik, who were her tutors and ultimately her canonizers, she was Illusio, the evasive one, because the physical perception of her gave no hint of her true nature.

Jack the Bodiless, himself a profound human anomaly, gave her the name Diamond-at first ironically, then later in the clear blaze of newfound love.

I, who am an antediluvian Franco-American, obstinately clinging to remnants of the tongue of my Quebecois forebears, always called her Dorothee, which a speaker of Standard English would p.r.o.nounce dor-oh-TAY. She said she liked that name best of all. But perhaps she was only trying to be kind to an old man who loved her even before she showed me what lay behind her mask.

It was none other than the Family Ghost who directed me to introduce the grandparents of Dorothee, and it was through them that I eventually came to know Diamond Mask herself.

Kyle Macdonald was a charming, hard-drinking author of popular science fiction novels and Tri-D scripts. He was no litterateur, only a competent journeyman writer with a fine comic flair who made a lot of money at his trade and frittered most of it away at the night spots and casinos of Earth and the cosmop worlds.

We first met in 2027, when Kyle was only twenty-one and enjoying the controversy provoked by his first outrageous novel, Prometheus Regnawed. We chanced to be lubricating ourselves side by side in the hotel bar at a World Fantasy Convention in Sydney, Australia, when a trio of well-sloshed local fans let their literary criticism get offensively verbal (Macdonald's novel featured a blockheaded Aussie character) and then physical. My innate Franco chivalry resented the odds against the embattled young author, who was brawny but unskilled in the martial arts, and I lent him moral support and a friendly fist or two to scatter the unG.o.dly.

We celebrated our victory with triple drams of Lagavulin 16, discovered that we had compatible bibliophilic tastes, and I wound up promising to help him dispose of some valuable Roger Zelazny collector's editions he had inherited. Kyle lived in Scotland, so we only managed to get together at the occasional fantasy or science fiction con to lift a jar, but we gossiped rather often over the teleview. I helped him with literary research, and from time to time he purchased rare old paper-printed fantasy items by mail from my antiquarian bookshop in New Hamps.h.i.+re.

Kyle Macdonald was not a metapsychic operant like me. He was, as were some 26 percent of humanity at that time, a normal possessing significant MP latencies, meaning that he carried the genes for higher mindpowers and had potentially strong metafaculties tucked away deep within his cranium-but for various reasons the powers were unusable. Sometimes latents were spontaneously raised to operancy by severe psychic trauma, but the more usual means involved specialized therapy by meta preceptors, using techniques pioneered by Catherine Remillard and her late husband Brett McAllister. But Kyle Macdonald's enormous font of latent creativity proved to be quite inaccessible- except insofar as it fueled his imagination and enabled him to earn a living as a writer of fantastic fiction.

My friends.h.i.+p with Macdonald might have remained casual if a certain Ghost had not intervened, commanding me to attend the 2029 World Fantasy Convention in London. I was ordered to make certain that Kyle met a young woman named Mary Ekaterina MacGregor-Gawrys, whom I myself would have to squire to the con and introduce to him.

Of all the humans possessing metapsychic powers in the mid twenty-first century, three families stood out: my own Franco-American clan, headed by Denis Remillard and his wife Lucille Cartier, the MacGregors of Scotland, and the Gawrys-Sakhvadzes of Polish-Georgian descent, who at that time lived mostly in England. Mary MacGregor-Gawrys, who was usually called Masha, was then a student at Oxford, where her parents Katharine MacGregor and Ilya Gawrys headed an important metapsychology research group at Jesus College. I had no acquaintance with Masha, but more distinguished Remillards than I-notably my nephew Denis-knew the MacGregor and Gawrys clans well. Once I had determined that the young woman enjoyed reading fantasy, I was able to trade shamelessly upon Denis's name and concoct a scheme that successfully lured her to the convention and to her destiny with Kyle Macdonald.

In spite of the fact that their minds were disparate, the two young people fell instantly in love. Brilliant, operant Masha, who had lived only for her studies up until then, was enchanted by Kyle's dynamic personality, his roguish good looks, and his screwball sense of humor. He in turn thought she was the loveliest creature he had ever seen, with a cascade of s.h.i.+ning red hair, eyes like living emeralds, and a pa.s.sionate temperament that she had successfully kept under control until Kyle Macdonald inspired her to cast restraint to the winds.

To the horror of her academic family, Masha dropped out of Oxford to spend the winter with the das.h.i.+ng Scottish scribe in his cruck-frame cottage on a windswept, romance-laden Hebridean island. The following spring the pair announced that they would marry. Masha was carrying Kyle's child, a boy of great metapsychic potential whom they planned to name Ian. The Gawrys and the MacGregor families gritted their teeth, s.h.i.+elded their thoughts well, and professed to be delighted. The newly-weds planned to move into more civilized digs in Edinburgh once the baby was born. Meanwhile, Kyle finished writing his second madcap transmedia best-seller, Nijinsky Takes a Quantum Leap.

Ian was born three months prematurely, but he was a st.u.r.dy child and he throve under intensive neonatal care, seeming little the worse for his abbreviated tenure in the womb ... except that his substantial metafaculties, like those of his father, proved to be intractably latent.

When it became evident that her firstborn son would not achieve operancy, Masha fell into a profound depression and seemed to lose interest in the baby. A nanny was hired and the young mother enrolled at the University of Edinburgh. There she resumed her studies under the benevolent eye of her maternal uncle, Davy MacGregor, who would later be appointed Planetary Dirigent of Earth.

During the next five years Masha and Kyle had three more children, Lachlan, Annie Laurie, and Diana, all powerful operants. Kyle's comic novels continued to top the best-seller lists and four of them were converted into blockbuster Tri-D shows. The most notable, Cream Cheese for Birkhoff's Bagel, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2036, and only lost because of the enduring prejudice of the Hollywood cineaste establishment against any production smacking of sci-fi.

Masha earned doctorates in medicine and metapsychology, eventually deciding to devote her talents to latency research. At the same time, her relations.h.i.+p with her husband grew stormier and stormier as a widening gulf opened between operant wife and nonoperant husband. Their quarrels were Homeric, especially when Masha took Kyle to task for neglecting his writing in favor of the more amusing perquisites of authors.h.i.+p-parties, travel, and the occasional overly attentive female fan. He was also an enthusiastic tosspot (one of the reasons we two got on so famously). The pressures of Kyle's celebrity, Masha's increasing impatience with his frivolous behavior, and her preoccupation with her own important work eventually caused the marriage to break down. They separated in 2044, but over the years there would be reconciliations, and they were never formally divorced.

Happy-go-lucky insensitive egotist that he was, Kyle had never considered the possibility that Masha would actually abandon him and take the children. His writing career faltered, and for six years after she chucked him out of their Edinburgh home he produced nothing, pa.s.sing the time in drinking, gambling, s.e.xual dalliance, and touring colonial planets of the Human Polity, supposedly in search of inspiration.

In 2051, when he was nearly broke, he attempted to pull himself together and wrote another novel, Mustangs of the Sombrero Galaxy. After this proved to be an excruciating flop, he emigrated with his tail between his legs to the Scottish ethnic world of Caledonia, where he became Writer in Residence at the colony's small University of New Glasgow. He taught creative writing cla.s.ses to earn bed and board in the faculty apartments and spent most of his free time in seedy pubs, ranting against perceived injustices in a Galactic Milieu run by elitist operants such as his perfidious wife, and cadging free drinks from science fiction fans who remembered his days of glory. When the Rebel faction expanded to include normals as well as metapsychic operants, he became one of its most eloquent literary proponents, achieving polity-wide notoriety as well as an improved bank balance by writing dark satires traducing the Milieu.

Through the years of his separation from Masha, Kyle Macdonald faithfully sent loving and hilarious letters to his four children back on Earth, describing his largely fict.i.tious adventures on far-flung worlds and latterly on the interesting Scottish planet. Ian, Lachlan, Annie Laurie, and Diana grew up believing that their father was a colorful adventurer living a fascinating life, while their mother seemed to place them second to her duties as a researcher at the University of Edinburgh and an Intendant a.s.sociate for Europe.

The three younger, operant Macdonald children eventually took degrees in metapsychology from Edinburgh's medical school. But Ian, even then a Rebel, matriculated instead at the North of Scotland Agricultural College in Aberdeen. Upon receiving his degree in xenohusbandry he emigrated to the planet Caledonia just as his father had done and filed a homestead application for an airfarm on the rugged northern continent of Beinn Bhiorach, which had just been opened to settlement.

About that time Kyle and Masha attempted a reconciliation. She had been chosen to be a magnate, and both of them attended the inaugural session at Concilium Orb when the Human Polity first took its seats. But the old conflicts between them resurfaced more virulently than ever, exacerbated by Kyle's envy of Masha's success. At the end of the inaugural session she washed her hands of him and returned to Earth while Kyle slunk back to Caledonia and went on an imperial toot Ian Macdonald, hoping to lift his father out of his despondency, invited Kyle to join him in working the airfarm. Although Kyle hastily declined (he was not a man fond of hard physical labor, except in the pursuit of pleasure), he was touched by his eldest son's gesture. He and Ian saw each other frequently during the two years it took to get the new enterprise established, and Ian became sympathetic to the Rebel cause his father had espoused.

Then, in 2054, Ian Macdonald visited Earth for the awarding of his brother Lachlan's first degree. At the ceremony in Edinburgh Ian met the woman who would become his wife and the mother of Diamond Mask.

Poor Masha, observing the divine thunderbolt strike her eldest son and the fledgling Doctor of Psychophysics, Viola Strachan, must have suffered a sickening attack of deja vu. Once again a brilliant, scholarly, operant young woman with a distinguished career ahead of her had fallen hopelessly in love with a handsome, latent, completely unsuitable man. That the man was Masha's own flesh and blood was quite irrelevant. She did everything she could to break up the romance, even revealing to Viola intimate details of her own unhappy marriage to Kyle. But her efforts were unavailing.

Viola Strachan was not a conventionally beautiful woman, but she was vivacious and possessed of an intense personal magnetism, an adjunct of her coercive metafaculty. Young Ian's romantic colonial background, his air of taciturn mystery, and his compelling s.e.xuality overcame all Masha's appeals to logic. The couple was married at St. Patrick's Church, Cowgate, and immediately returned to Caledonia, where the reality of life on a colonial planet hundreds of lightyears from Earth only gradually became evident to the starstruck bride.

Caledonia has an austere magnificence and is richly endowed with natural resources, but no one has ever called it an immigrant's paradise. Few of the so-called ethnic worlds are, being more marginal in human preferenda and harder to colonize than the more appealing cosmopolitan planets that are open to settlers of any Earth nation. To encourage people to live on the more difficult worlds, the Milieu allows human ethnic groups that it judges to have sufficient "dynamism" to found colonies almost exclusively populated with their own stock. In contrast to the motley human culture of the cosmop worlds, the people of the ethnic planets make a special effort to reflect the heritage of their Earthling ancestors. For instance, an ethnic colonial government may encourage the day-to-day use of an old native language or dialect now severely restricted on Earth, provided that the citizens are equally fluent in the Standard English of the Human Polity. Ethnic costume (authentic and colorfully bogus), native arts and crafts, traditional occupations and the like are also de rigueur, insofar as they are not contrary to civilized usage, economically detrimental, s.e.xually repressive, incompatible with the mandated Milieu standards of education and social justice, or xenophobic.

Thus, it is meet and just for Caledonians to speak the Gaidhlig or mangle the Guid Scots Tongue, wear tartans (whether ent.i.tled to them or not), idolize golf, go flyfis.h.i.+ng with Spey rods for naturalized Caledonian salmon, celebrate Highland Games, distill and guzzle Scotch whisky, eat cullen skink, c.o.c.k-a-leekie, bashed neeps, cranachan, and mutton, make pets of collies, Scottish terriers, long-horned Highland cattle, and Shetland ponies, play bagpipes, and designate "Westering Home" as the planetary anthem. But they are forbidden excesses of ethnic fervor such as clan blood feuds, the humiliation or ma.s.sacre of Sa.s.senach (English) visitors, pa.s.sing laws requiring all inhabitants to eat haggis, or forcing children to do manual labor rather than go to school.

Since Caledonia was one of the earliest ethnic worlds settled after the Great Intervention in 2013, its population was already fairly large-approaching a million people-when Viola Strachan arrived in 2054. Many of the first generation of settlers had come from the Hebrides and the Scottish Highlands, but there were also citizens of Scottish blood who had emigrated from the Lowlands, from other parts of Britain, from Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. As might be expected in a group having strong Celtic genes, there was a sizable community of stalwart metapsychic operants, as well as many lower-grade metas with more modest mindpowers. In accordance with the social engineering policy of the Milieu, over half of the normal populace were high latents like Ian Macdonald, who carried genes for strong metafunction and might be expected to engender operant descendants in good time.

The bias favoring meta colonists on the ethnic worlds, which seemed reasonable and proper to nonhuman Milieu policymakers desiring to encourage coadunation of the Human Mind and its eventual embrace of Unity, was destined to be one of the significant factors in the Metapsychic Rebellion of 2083. When Viola Strachan first set foot on the Scottish planet twenty-nine years earlier, its nonoperant element (including her husband and father-in-law) was already flirting with sedition, while the metas were mostly enthusiastic supporters of the exotic-dominated Galactic confederation.

Caledonia's star, a solar-type G2 V, is 533 lightyears away from Earth. Its inhabited fourth planet is a trifle larger than Earth but not nearly as ma.s.sive, covered with a vast hydrosphere (laconically known as The Sea) in which smallish continents and many volcanic island arcs are sprinkled. A large Earth-type moon travels in an orbit rather close to the planet, causing very high tides. The mountainous north and south temperate-zone landma.s.ses have glaciers that constantly give birth to icebergs. An extensive mantle of clouds, together with smoke and airborne ash from the abundant active volcanoes, makes the climate generally chillier than Earth's, while the ocean is comparatively warmer and shallower, with teeming aquatic life.

The native flora and fauna of Caledonia have not evolved much beyond the equivalent of our Mesozoic Era. Its genome is terrestrial-equivalent, and minimal ecoengineering by the exotic races rendered the place compatible to introduced Earth crops, fish, and domestic livestock. The most advanced native animal species are the myriad gorgeous birdlike creatures and a cla.s.s of ferocious invertebrate predators bearing an embarra.s.sing resemblance to the Krondaku. (Members of that ancient, ultraintelligent race rarely visit Caledonia for this reason, in spite of its unique geology, superlative fossils, and outstanding local booze.) Most of the colonists live in twelve continental states: Orcadia, Nessie, Cairngorm, Ardnamurchan, Atholl, Strathbogie, Katrine, Argyll, St. Andrews, Caithness, Beinn Bhiorach, and Clyde-site of New Glasgow, the capital, and Wester Killiecrankie Starport.

The economy of the planet is largely dependent upon exports, and when Viola lived there it was still not totally self-sufficient. A much-sought-after renewable resource are the exquisitely beautiful Caledonian pearls, fas.h.i.+oned by native artisans into high-priced jewelry much coveted by the Poltroyan race as well as by humankind. Fully automated mines produce industrial diamonds, inexpensive gem-quality diamonds of many colors, fiber graphite, buckyball carbon, lanthanides, and gold. Some continents have extensive sheep ranches, where bioengineered animals yield fine wool famed throughout the Human Polity. In the cities there are fabric mills and garment-making establishments, although a lot of handweaving and knitting is also done as a cottage industry in the more remote regions. Glom components, nanotech equipment, gourmet honey, and the better brands of Caledonian single-malt whisky were at that time exported to the nearest human cosmop world, Okanagon, then a populous Milieu Sector Base and the home of the Twelfth Fleet. In those days Caledonia also enjoyed extensive tourist trade from Okanagon, which was only nineteen lightyears away, and from the "j.a.panese" ethnic world Satsuma, twenty-seven lights distant.