The 21st century was drawing to a close, and metapsychic humankind was poised at last to achieve Unity -- to be admitted into the group mind of the already unified alien races of the Galactic Milieu. But a growing corps of rebels was plotting to keep the people of Earth forever separate in the name of human individuality. And the rebels had a secret supporter: Fury, the insane metapsychic creatrue that would stop at nothing to claim humanity for itself. Fury's greatest enemy was the mutant genius Jack the Bodiless, whose power it craved. But Jack would never be a tool for Fury . . . And so it turned to Dorothea Macdonald, a young woman who had spent a lifetime hiding her towering mindpowers from the best mind readers of the Milieu. But she could not hide them from Fury -- or from Jack. Time and again she rejected their advances, unwilling to be drawn into the maelstrom of galactic politics or megalomaniacal dreams. And in the end, no one -- not Jack, not Fury, not even the Galactic Milieu -- would be a match for the awesome powers of the girl who would come to be called Diamond Mask . . . Julian May was born in Chicago in 1931. She has written numerous books, including the four books of The Saga of Pliocene Exile, the two books of Intervention, and The Galactic Milieu Trilogy. She also collaborated with André Norton and Marion Zimmer Bradley on the successful fantasy novel Black Trillium . May lives in Bellevue, Washington. PROLOGUE   KAUAI, HAWAII, EARTH 12 AUGUST 2113   HE KNEW IT HAD TO BE SOME KIND OF MIRACLE—PERHAPS ONE PROGRAMMED by Saint Jack the Bodiless himself. The misty rain of the Alakai Swamp ceased, the gray sky that had persisted all day broke open suddenly and flaunted glorious expanses of blue, a huge rainbow haloed Mount Waialeale over to the east … and a bird began to sing.   Batège! That bird—could it be the one? After four futile days?   The tall, skinny old man dropped to his knees in the muck, slipped out of his backpack straps, and let the pack fall into the tussocks of dripping grass. Muttering in the Canuck patois of northern New England, he pulled his little audiospectrograph from its waterproof pouch with fingers that trembled from excitement and hit the RECORD pad. The hidden songster warbled on. The old man pressed SEEK. The device’s computer compared the recorded birdsong with that of 42,429 avian species (Indigenous Terrestrial, Indigenous Exotic, Introduced, Retroevolved, and Bioengineered) stored in its data files. The MATCH light blinked on and the instrument’s tiny display read:   O’O-A’A (MOHO BRACCATUS). ONLY ON ISL OF KAUAI, EARTH. IT. VS.   The man said to himself: Damn right you’re Very Scarce. Even rarer than the satanic nightjar or the miniature tit-babbler! But I gotcha at last, p’tit merdeux, toi.   The song cut off and a discordant keet-keet rang out. Something black with flashes of chrome yellow erupted from the moss-hung shrubs on the left side of the trail, flew toward a clump of stunted lehua makanoe trees twenty meters away, and disappeared.   The old man choked back a penitent groan. Quel bondieu d’imbécile—he’d frightened it with some inadvertent telepathic gaucherie! And now it was gone, and his feeble metapsychic seekersense was incapable of locating its faint life-aura in broad daylight. Everything now depended upon the camera.   Taking care to project only the most soothing and amiable vibes, he hastily stowed away the Sonagram machine, uncased a digital image recorder with a thermal targeter attached, and began anxiously scanning the trees. Wisps of vapor streamed up, drawn by the tropical sun. The sweet anise scent of mokihana berries mingled with that of rotting vegetation. The Alakai Swamp of Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands was an eerie place, the wettest spot on Earth, a plateau over 1200 meters high where the annual rainfall often exceeded 15 meters. The swamp was also home to some of Earth’s rarest birds, and it attracted hardy human students of avifauna from all over the Galactic Milieu.   The old man, whose name was Rogatien Remillard, knew the island well, having first come to it back in 2052, when his great-grandnephew Jack, whom he called Ti-Jean, was newborn with a body that seemed perfectly normal. Jack’s mother Teresa, rest her poor soul, had needed a sunny place to recuperate after hiding out in the snowbound Megapod Reserve of British Columbia, and the island afforded a perfect refuge for the three of them.   Rogi had returned to Kauai many times since then, most recently four days earlier, for reasons that had seemed compelling at the time.   Well, perhaps he’d imbibed just a tad too much Wild Turkey as he celebrated the completion of another section of his memoirs …   Crafty in his cups, he had decided to get out of town before his Lylmik nemesis could catch up with him and force him to continue the work. He’d done a damned good job so far, if he did say so himself—and he might as well, since only God kne