by Bill Adams
“That data cube you’ve seen me working on these last few days,” Foyle replied. “A fully documented history of the pieces. I started with the original jeweler’s designs from the Elitist data banks, and ended with holograms of their position and appearance when found, and all the other facts needed to confirm authenticity.”
“And that’s the real treasure,” the senator said, more of the politician in his voice than I had heard before. “What viewers can actually take away with them. The history.”
Another secret Old Rite man? Could be. Always discreetly defending the old liberties from within the Column’s own Senate. Who knew how many of us there might still be out there, in the Hellway of the stars, slowly winding our way back toward the center, and revelation?
As he went on speechmaking, a Column marine sergeant entered the room with a crisp stride. All eyes shifted to him. The senator coolly kept talking, but he did raise his eyebrows when the soldier drew me aside.
“Sir, I was told to inform you that the arrest has been made, in Docking Bay Two. The individual was alone. He’s in custody, and we are prepared to bring him here as ordered, in restraints.”
I led him a step farther away from anyone else. “Restraints?”
“Handcuffs and leg irons, sir.”
“What about the gag?”
“I…don’t recall that detail of the orders, sir.”
“Good God, man, of course he’s supposed to be gagged. You may bring him in as soon as you’ve seen to that.”
He saluted smartly, turned to salute the senator, and made his exit. Everyone was looking at me.
“Yes, that was it,” I told them. “Sir Max will be joining us in just a moment.”
“And what did the sergeant have to discuss with you?” DeVysse asked.
I grimaced and picked up my case. “Intelligence business. First of all, the colonel is insisting that Condé remain gagged, at least until after he’s been interrogated.”
The senator made a puzzled noise, and I shrugged.
“You know Security types. And apparently they’ve found something in Condé’s little boat they think I should have an immediate look at. It’s probably not important, but”—I caught the senator’s eye—“I’d like to keep our own record of anything we turn over to the Tribunal. Will you excuse me?”
“Of course, Commissioner, if duty calls.” The senator looked just as glad to reclaim the limelight. And as I left, he made a strange sound of contentment with his nose, a loud buzzing snuffle. Whereupon DeVysse, a step or two behind him, flinched like a man under the ten thousandth droplet of a water torture.
But I still couldn’t get to Docking Bay Two without passing Condé in the corridor.
The marine colonel had decided that he could cut a dashing figure anyway, by leading the prisoner escort. I told him that the senator had ordered me to search Condé’s boat, and he gave me a password to get by the guards. “But look here, before you go,” he said, and stepped aside to show me Condé. “What’s this gag business? First I’ve heard of it.”
My former employer had been standing with his head bowed, that great shock of white hair in disarray. They’d ripped the militia patches off the admiral’s uniform he’d been wearing, and his hands and feet were bound with chains. But now he looked up, his tanned hawk nose extending beyond a tight gag. His eyes grew wide at the sight of me, and he gave a surprised grunt.
“Oh, you don’t want to take that off,” I said.
“He was quiet enough before.”
“That’s the way it is with these megalomaniacs. One minute they’re quietly sorting through their delusions, and the next they’re screaming at the top of their lungs.”
Condé tried to say my name, but you can’t make a p sound in a gag. He bumped into the colonel sideways and jerked his head at me, gargling louder and louder. “I see what you mean,” the colonel said, frowning.
Nor an f sound. After that, Condé went for sheer unintelligible volume, and made an abortive attempt to butt me in the stomach. “He’s a goddamn loon, isn’t he?” the colonel marveled as two of his men tried to subdue him.
“Hope you don’t have to shoot him,” I called back, moving right along. “…Not that anyone would blame you, really.”
The password got me past the marine guards at the docking bay into Condé’s hopped-up Hermes, and I promptly closed all the airlocks behind me, fired up the reactor, strapped in, and opened a link to the yacht’s computer net. The master computer told me I couldn’t detach the boat. But that was before it had spoken with my skeleton coder.
Twenty seconds later, the little craft rolled out into space, I punched in a provisional course, and the engine kicked in. By this time I was getting baffled and desperate radio calls from the yacht and the defense satellites.
I immediately sent back a clear visual signal of myself, Column uniform angled to the camera, saying something complicated and reassuring with lots of gestures and facial expression, but no sound.
Five minutes of this gave me as much head start as I needed. I switched to autopilot and took the high-g drugs, and when the engines hissed up to full power I was safely unconscious.
I was awakened on schedule, twenty minutes before final solar approach. No one was following me, not within scanner range.
Yawning, I lifted the carrying case into my lap and removed the heavy slab within. Time to jettison the deadweight. Using my elbow, I gently smashed in the small hollow center of the otherwise solid slab.
Foyle had never understood magic tricks—a perfect dupe from the audience, not only buying my story of one entirely genuine case and one entirely solid copy, but helping to sell it to the others, too. In consideration for which, I’d left her most of the real jewelry, in the mostly hollow case she’d correctly judged the lighter. It was only the central tenth of her slab, seemingly containing the best and smallest piece, that was solid simulacrum glass.
I took the prize from my slab, and with the other hand removed from my pocket the data cube I’d rifled from Foyle’s room an hour before—the provenance. I gloated over this matched set for only a moment, then couldn’t help slipping the original Master’s ring of the Kanalists onto my finger and exulting at how well it fit.
No one could make better use of it than I. Foyle had said that there were countless Old Rite lodges underground, awaiting only the appearance of a Master with the True Ring to start Kanalism anew. Who better to play the part than the most famous of Old Rite Kanalists, returned from the dead? What better time to revive the fight for human liberty than now, when the Consultant and the Column had fallen out like thieves?
Besides, the ring was mine by right; Summerisle had willed it to me. To be sure, he couldn’t have known that I would stumble upon it by bumming around the freer fringes for years, unconsciously searching for my cultural roots. He’d arranged for me to get it another way, the last time I saw him, when we’d met by the fountain at the Great Plaza—when, in fact, he’d told me exactly where to find the Vice Book.
“ ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing.’ Trust me, as Pope of our little order, to do what’s best, even if it means abjuring my mystic Book forever, like Prospero…It will be safe for centuries, or until the next Master comes to find it.”
He’d overestimated me. I’d forgotten the name of the fountain inside the Labyrinth, and that was the key to the Alexander Pope quotation, which continues, ‘Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring.’ And in The Tempest, Prospero vows to ‘drown’ his book. I was certain, now, that Summerisle’s Vice Book was still safe, deep in the base of a Kanalist fountain. Not the fountain in the destroyed Nexus Labyrinth, but the disguised copy in the plaza, which only he had known to be Kanalist. Until he showed it to me—the heir to his Book.
Even if I’d never entered the Blue Swathe, the Book would have led me to Newcount Two, and to the Ring that was waiting for me. Because surely the “Vice” Book had once been the “Weiss”—or White—Codex, and had contained the whole hist
ory and technological lore of the Elitists, before we’d added all the scandalous personal secrets of the latter Kanalists.
Summerisle had been bound by oaths not to use the information for blackmail; but he’d hand-chosen a Master who would not be, who could revenge him and our Federal Alignment on the First Columnards—many of whom still lived, occupying key positions of power in their old age. And that wasn’t the only weapon against the Column within the Book. Its technological secrets might also turn out to be tremendously potent.
For Summerisle’s hokey stories had proven entirely true. Since there was a cabal called the Few, who hijacked navy ships and made use of “secret lore”—read “Titan technology”—they’d stolen from our Book, what else mightn’t the same Book tell me?
If the Barbarossa was truly floating in a bubble outside space, wouldn’t that make its log readings appear “globally distorted”—though understandable, once one had the cosmological key? And if it was truly outside time, then wouldn’t my mates still be there, no older than when I last saw them—not yet betrayed because I could still rescue them? Anything is possible. The sun is new every day.
But first things first. I programmed in a target star: the star circled by Nexus, its plazas and fountains. Then I leaned back and stretched, thinking of the note I’d left Ariel:
BUTTERFLY DREAM
That dawn, the sight of her was all it took
To stun you flat, your wings like flowers clapped
Between the pages of an ancient book
By a little girl. A poet Monarch, rapt.
She wakes. I hold my breath and you your wings.
To save our dream (this bubble world) from Time,
I twine its limbs and leaves (and balancings)
Into an Aerial arbor: rhythmic rhyme.
The hands of all the clocks sow dust and death
Behind us. But what they bury, Art retrieves.
And when we held that world within a breath,
A wingbeat—I pressed a girl between the leaves.
Just verses, not poetry. But the way they’d spilled forth, as if from a full reservoir—that was a new feeling. Or an old one. I remembered the fantasy I’d had in the eel-balloon, Cyrano On The Moon; a similar tone might serve…
Save it, I thought, feeling a rush of vast, impersonal power coming under my control, like a sailor with a fresh wind rising behind him, strong and true. There will be enough time. That was the message of the old ring. I wound it on my finger, gazing at the maze that was its setting, and in that maze the mirror, and in that mirror the image of a mask so changeable it might even be a Master’s face.
It winked back at me, one bright flash, as I pushed the lever forward and plunged into the sun.
About the Authors
A graduate of Harvard University and Mahopac High School, BILL ADAMS is known to readers of mystery fiction as T. M. Adams. He has also been a bonded courier, motel manager, and night dispatcher of everything from grocery trucks to private detectives. He died in 2019.
An alumnus of University of Miami and Penn State, CECIL BROOKS has, as well as writing, coded for a life insurance company, cooked in a vegetarian restaurant, set type and designed books, been a photographer, done leather-work for exotics, and spent long years as executive of an environmental non-profit. He lives in Pennsylvania.
Books by Bill Adams and Cecil Brooks
The Unwound Way
The End of Fame
Books by Bill Adams
Tilt!
Dead Sirius
Off the Map
Quick Tricks
