It would try. Of course it would. I'd have to kill it. KILL IT EVEN MORE PAINFULLY THAN IT KILLED THEM!

... There. Now you understand!

The section of orange she had just taken seemed to turn to dust in her mouth, half choking her and setting her to coughing. She had to drink quickly from her canteen to restore herself. Still breathing raggedly, her heart thudding in her breast, she stared at the stony ground.

Understanding.

Knowing the truth not only about her culpable witness to Hydra's crime in the sea-cave, but also the truth about the promise she had given her father. There were mitigating circ.u.mstances for the first sin: overwhelming fear, and the egocentrism of a very young child. But the second action, back on Caledonia, had been quite different. Hearing her father's agonized plea, she had decided just what she would do when she found her mother's murderers. She would not simply capture them and bring them before the Milieu authorities, but- "Oh, G.o.d," Dee whispered, and covered her face with her hands.

Later, when the last fragment of the thing that had shattered inside her was gone, she was amazed to discover that it was late afternoon. Fog was stealing over the water, into the bays and coves, and making its first tentative foray onto the land. Dee packed up her things and climbed to her feet, aching all over, realizing that she must have been sitting there without moving for over two hours.

"Right," she said aloud. "Definitely time to leave."

It was a little over three kilometers to her journey's end, where her car would be waiting. Once beyond Falcon Cave (and the ravine where she once thought she had seen the Kilnave Fiend) the walking would be fairly easy. She would have to stay close to the cliff edge in order to avoid bogs, but her farsight would keep her safe in the thickening fog.

When she had pa.s.sed this way as a child, she and the others had remained on the height above the beach and obtained only a partial view of the bird-cave. This time there was no surf, and she decided to take the low route to get a look at the cavern's interior. A strong air current streaming from the large opening in the rocks blew the encroaching mist away. It was still very quiet except for the sound of her boots squeaking on the sand. Inside, the grotto was s.p.a.cious and deep, much more impressive than Gilmour's. The doves had unaccountably abandoned the place but their guano whitened many of the rocks protruding from the sandy floor.

The wind from within the cave was steady and it bore a peculiar musty scent quite unlike bird droppings. Dee progressed to a point where the fading daylight did not penetrate. Her farsight seemed to show that the cave ended another thirty meters or so further in, but when she reached the back of the chamber she noticed that the airflow had become stronger and had changed direction. It was now blowing from somewhere above her head. When she "looked" up she saw a ledge about six meters high interrupting the sloping, rough-surfaced wall. Above it was a crevice that seemed wide enough to admit a human body. A nonoperant person exploring the cave with artificial light when the cave-wind was not blowing would likely have missed the crack entirely because of the way it was shadowed.

There was a way up. Using her stick and her PK, she negotiated the climb, then pushed her way through the tight crevice. Its sides were unpleasantly wet from dripping groundwater. After she had penetrated ten meters or so the pa.s.sage opened into another large chamber. Dee straightened and stepped inside, scanning upward with her farsight to see how high the ceiling was.

And stepped on something brittle that crunched beneath her boot.

She did not scream when her mind's eye discovered the bones. The only sound she made was a low moan of sorrow.

So many bones! Skulls and rib cages, the long bones of legs and arms, perforated pelvic basins, disarticulated small bones that had been the framework of hands, feet, and vertebral columns. The skeletal remains were white and clean, and all of them were human. Dee counted the skulls. There were thirty-three, some adult and some belonging to children.

Inspector Chaimbeul had told her that the presumed victims of the "Kilnave Fiend" still unaccounted for numbered twenty-nine. Dee wondered who the other four had been. Lonely day-trippers from the mainland with no one to report them missing on Islay? Boaters who had come unsuspecting to sh.o.r.e for a picnic and instead found death lurking on the pretty beach of Falcon Cave?

The underground wind still blew, this time from another opening at ground level that was less than a meter in diameter; but Dee was too distraught now to do anything but retreat. She turned and re-entered the cramped slot leading to the main cavern.

A light was shining at the other end.

With a sharp intake of breath Dee stopped to focus her farsight in the darkness.

Not one light, but six! Small brilliant pinp.r.i.c.ks like three pairs of stars ... or glowing eyes.

Two women and a man were standing shoulder to shoulder on the ledge just beyond the tunnel's end. The Hydras-Madeleine, Celine, and Parnell Remillard-dressed in ordinary outdoor clothing, were waiting for her to come out.

"Oh, dear Jesus!" she whispered, nearly paralyzed with dread.

Whatever confidence she possessed had evaporated at the sight of those pathetic bones. She was no longer a brilliant, highly educated young woman, a grandmastercla.s.s metapsychic nominated to the Galactic Concilium, but only a panic-stricken fifteen-year-old girl who had grossly overestimated her own bravery. Pressing back the way she had come, she staggered into the bone-room heedless of the relics crackling underfoot The old sense of dire warning thundered in her brain, urging her to flee for her life.

They came after her then. One at a time and slowly, because they were larger than she and the pa.s.sage very narrow.

The wind still blew.

Dee ran to the entrance of the next tunnel, threw off her backpack, dropped her stick, and crawled into the opening on her hands and knees. Where did the pa.s.sage lead? Desperately, she probed ahead with her ultrasenses, not expecting to learn much. Seeing through expanses of solid rock was formidably difficult even for a Grand Master Fa.r.s.eer-and yet she accomplished the task now with an ease that astounded her. The tunnel she was in slanted steeply upward and entered another underground chamber having two other exits. The larger pa.s.sageway, which was the source of the wind, angled off, twisting and turning, for nearly half a kilometer until it abruptly plunged into unknown depths. The smaller tunnel, up near the ceiling, was only three or four meters in length. It terminated at the surface.

Dee wriggled madly up the incline, dislodging loose chunks of rock that rolled and rattled behind her. Why weren't the Hydras combining in metaconcert, trying to stop her with their mind-devouring ploy? Working together, they might be able to kill her with psychokinesis or some bizarre manifestation of creativity. Instead, they seemed determined to apprehend her physically.

One of the Hydra-women, Celine, was more slender and agile than the others. She came eeling up the pa.s.sage after Dee with incredible rapidity, uttering monotonous telepathic obscenities.

Dee reached the third cave-chamber and began to scramble up the steep wall. She struggled onto a rocky shelf eight meters above the floor and tried to gather her shaken wits to decide what to do next. The exit shaft was another four meters up and there were no more footholds.

Celine Remillard appeared, screaming vulgar insults out loud. For a moment she paused, irresolute, staring up at Dee. The Hydra was fair-haired and sweetly pretty and the mind that looked out through her turquoise eyes was mad. Giving a final maniacal cry, she changed into a soot-black monstrosity with glowing eyes, a serpentine neck, and multiple arms-a smaller version of the metaconcerted Hydra. A split second later the thing conjured up a hissing ball of energy and flung it at Dee.

Without thinking, the girl spun a psychocreative shield. The lightning-ball hit the barrier and disintegrated into a shower of embers that rained onto the cavern floor. Roaring, the Hydra lifted a broken piece of rock the size of a small desk and hurled it without effort. Dee's shield held and the deflected missile fell with a great crash, cracking apart into sharp-edged fragments. The Hydra shrieked in frustration. An inhuman leap carried it across the rubble-strewn floor to the base of the wall. It began to climb like a huge spider, slowly and carefully.

At that moment the head of Parnell Remillard appeared in the opening of the lower tunnel. Crawling awkwardly into the chamber, he shouted, "Get her quick, Cele! That's the way out!"

By now the creature was nearly halfway to Dee's precarious perch. It seemed unable to climb as fast as a human. As Dee cowered behind her mental shield her farsight perceived the third Hydra-unit, the woman she had first known as Magdala MacKendal, enter the chamber and speak urgently to her male companion.

Abruptly, Dee's protective barrier evaporated. The three units had not combined in true metaconcert, but Dee knew instinctively that the other two had lent the black monster sufficient creativity to neutralize her mental shield. The thing slowly raised one limb and pointed it at her in a purposeful manner.

Dee tensed, shifting all her mindpower into the psychokinetic mode. Levitation was all that could save her now-a maneuver that operant preceptors considered ostentatious and decla.s.se, one that was never taught to PK-adept students. Most powerfully operant children learned it anyway. But before Dee could carry out the levitation sequence the Hydra pitched another lightning-ball at her with blinding speed. This time the ma.s.s of raw energy struck Dee's right thigh, burning through the denim of her jeans and searing the leg almost to the bone.

She screamed in agony and nearly fell, but peripheral PK steadied her feet and the redactive metafaculty that automatically responded to injury cut off input to her sensory nerves. What her redaction could not do immediately was restore the ruined sartorius and rectus femoris muscles of her upper leg. And with the greater portion of her mental potential diverted w.i.l.l.y-nilly to self-redaction, Dee found she was unable to levitate.

Huddled on the ledge with tears of pain streaming from her eyes, she watched the Hydra continue to creep upward toward her. Viewed by farsight, it was shadowless.

Kill me if you can! the insane creature said, almost gaily.

No. I won't deliberately try to kill you Celine. Not now.

Then you are a fool, said the Hydra.

Confident that it would now be able to penetrate whatever mental protection Dee could erect, the monster had not bothered to put up a psychocreative screen of its own. It seemed to think its quarry had surrendered. With a wild giggle, it produced another globe of deadly energy and held it up for the girl to see.

Instead of cringing, Dee picked up a fist-sized stone and propelled it with all her remaining physical strength, striking the Hydra squarely between its blazing, demented eyes. The lightning-ball winked out in the onslaught of unexpected hurt and the monster faltered, black limbs scratching frantically for purchase. But before it could recover Dee threw another stone, again striking the misshapen head. Wailing, the Hydra lost its grip and fell, landing heavily on the jagged rocks below.

"Cele!" the other two cried. Unaccountably, they did not rush to the aid of their fallen companion. Instead they remained standing side by side, motionless.

The Hydra stirred. Its body flickered and for an instant Dee farsaw the human form of Celine Remillard staggering upright, her face twisted with pain. Then the woman straightened and gave a triumphant cry, apparently reinvigorated by some unconcerted mental ploy of Parnell and Madeleine. She underwent her terrible metamorphosis, and Hydra reappeared. It immediately began to climb the wall again, and this time it wore a mental shield of its own.

The terror and confusion that had afflicted Dee earlier had pa.s.sed away, leaving her in control of what faculties she could still muster. Even if she managed to divert mental energy from the redaction, there would still be only enough vitality remaining to fully activate a single higher mindpower.

Very well. Then let it be creativity, the strongest of all.

The agony from her ghastly burn returned as her redaction withdrew, and so did the traumatic shock. She was seized with a sudden attack of dizziness and a profound weakness. At first her body refused to obey when she ordered it to move, but a roar from the advancing monster, intended to intimidate her, had the opposite effect. Still crouching on the ledge, Dee stretched out her right arm and thrust her fingers into the nearly featureless rock face.

Her creativity softened the stone like putty. She gouged out a foothold at knee height, then a second somewhat higher, then a third and a fourth. Once her hand withdrew, the rock rehardened instantly, leaving a useful hole. Dee began to swarm up the wall, letting her injured leg hang free and supporting most of her weight with her arms.

The Hydra reached the rock shelf, extinguished its shield, and extended its upper limbs, ready to seize her. Dee clawed out a final hold and heaved herself up into the tiny pa.s.sageway, gasping from pain and exertion. The tunnel was barely wide enough for her shoulders. The cave-wind hissed past her, seeming to push her gently toward freedom, and she began to worm her way upward. Ahead lay a dim gray area of light that had to be the evening sky.

Then something took hold of her right ankle and pulled at her hideously burned leg.

In hindsight, she knew she should have switched to the coercive mode and forced the Hydra to release her. But the abrupt blaze of new pain canceled all rationality. Her creativity was available and so she used it, accelerating the exhalation of the cave-wind to hurricane force. Her small body was propelled through the pa.s.sageway like a human cannonball. The Hydra's grip tore loose from her ankle. She flew out of the tunnel mouth on a roaring blast into the foggy night, tumbling head over heels through the air like a discarded doll.

There was a stunning splash. She had landed in a shallow bog. Before the pain could render her unconscious, she called on her redaction. Crawling on her elbows and one knee through the yielding muck, she was able to reach the bog's edge and haul herself onto dry ground.

She had emerged in a region of nearly level moorland all swathed in mist. Her farsight, used gingerly, revealed that less than 30 meters away the land abruptly terminated in a precipice above the sea. The north sh.o.r.e trail skirted the cliff's edge. Behind her was the bog, to the left a dale with a tiny burn that flowed down into Falcon Cave cove, and to the right lay a jumble of rocks surrounding the subterranean shaft. Gnarled old heather bushes grew in rank profusion over much of the area. If she had fallen in them she would very likely have broken every bone in her body.

The roaring wind had stopped. Dee heard her own pounding heart, the trickling of the stream, and the distant sigh of the sea. Another noise, a very faint splashing, seemed to come from the other end of the bog. After a few moments it stopped.

Dee's wrist-communicator was smashed and inoperative, but she would not have chosen to use it even if it worked, nor did she intend to send out a farspoken cry for help. She stripped off her muddy parka, her sweater, which was hardly wet at all, and her cotton flannel shirt. Dipping part of the shirt in the stream's clear water, she bound it carefully about her wounded leg and tied it in place. She put the sweater back on and hung the parka over her shoulders. In its capacious pockets were a bandanna handkerchief, a damp Hershey's chocolate bar, her wallet, her hotel room key, and the encoded pla.s.s strip that would unlock and activate her rented groundcar.

She tied the bandanna on her head and ate the chocolate. A swift, circ.u.mscribing beam of seekersense a.s.sured her that there were no Hydra-units in the vicinity. It was no use searching for them underground. Deep beneath the rocks of Islay, their auras would be imperceptible to her. It didn't matter. If they were hiding in the tunnel network they were no danger to her.

Dee's injured leg was as useless as a length of wood, but her mental strength was returning and she knew she would be able to hobble to the car park where her rented vehicle waited. The village of Bowmore was only 20 kilometers away. She would first make a report to Inspector Chaimbeul, then drive to the little hospital and check in.

The authorities could deal with the Hydra. Dee didn't give a d.a.m.n about it anymore. Strangely, the inhibitory barriers deep in her mind seemed to have crumbled, perhaps as a result of the moral insight she had experienced earlier. She felt no special increase in her powers, but in her present traumatized state that was to be expected. She'd let Catherine Remillard investigate her expanded metapsychic complexus when she had recovered.

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

The solution to that mystery would have to wait.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

22.

FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD.

Of all the higher mindpowers, creativity is the strangest.

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

Qu'a dieu ne plaise!

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

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

Every creature with true willpower possesses a modic.u.m of it. Creativity is the integrator and modulator of the entire mind, forming the linkage between thought and matter. It's literally the inspiration-the "breathing in"-of the divine into what would otherwise be mere mud molecules. Le bon dieu had to tell us himself that humans are most G.o.dlike when they love one another. Left to ourselves, we equate G.o.dliness with creativity because human beings appreciate results.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But now I'm getting ahead of myself ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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