Meeting at Infinity

by John Brunner

  Abruptly, he seemed to recollect something. “One moment!” he said, and hastened into a room leading off the foyer. Gaffles made to follow him, and then checked himself as he caught a warning look from the lock artist.

  “What’s in there?” he demanded under his breath.

  “The woman. She’s cocooned, and it isn’t pretty. If all the parts of her that are covered were burned, she ought to be six feet underground.”

  “If he managed that,” Gaffles commented respectfully, “he can fix Erlking easily!”

  They waited impatiently. Some of the police began to recover and complain loudly; accordingly he threatened to kick them silent, and they shut up. They seemed bewildered, especially the sergeant he himself had knocked down.

  Knard returned, sighing heavily with relief, and after switching off the fights in the room he had left and shutting its door, said, “My patient is all right, I’m glad to see. I think there will have to be investigation into this affair. Thank you very much for your assistance, Mr.—?”

  “Gaffles,” he supplied. “But—I’m afraid we want more than just thanks, Dr. Knard. We need your help. We have a man called Erlking, used to be Ahmed Lyken’s Remembrancer. He was burned with an energy bolt, and he’s pretty bad. But this number Erlking, you see, is kind of important. He’s got to stay alive, because he knows something about something that Lyken thinks is very important, and Clostrides of The Market is after him, and maybe other people, too. You’re the best in the world—so we came to get you for him.”

  He was prepared for expostulations and objections from the doctor. Instead, a peculiar expression crossed his face. He said, “How long ago was he with Lyken, then?”

  “Four or five years, I guess,” said Gaffles, taken aback. Knard nodded almost excitedly.

  “And what does he know that’s so important?” he demanded.

  Again, Gaffles felt at a loss. “We—uh—we’re not so sure,” he said. “It’s just that we think his hypnolocks have slipped a bit. Yesterday Nevada, this same Nevada that’s married to your patient, said something to Lyken which—”

  “I know about that,” interrupted Knard, and added something which meant nothing at all to Gaffles. “If he was with Lyken five years ago, that means …”

  Gaffles hesitated. “Will you come?” he said at last, vaguely surprised that he could put the question so straightforwardly.

  “By all means,” said Knard briskly, and went to collect his gear.

  16

  KNARD SEEMED not to notice either the way he was taken or where he arrived; he seemed to have put his mind into suspension for the time it took to bring him face to face with Erlking. They had taken the former Remembrancer to the Octopus and installed him in Lorrel’s own bedroom behind the public rooms. Jockey, Tad and two more yonder boys were with him.

  Jockey had been bending over the bed, watching Erlking’s mouth move as though trying to read his lips, till the moment the door opened to let in Gaffles and Knard. He straightened and turned, and asked a quick question with his eyes. Gaffles gave a nod in answer.

  He said to Knard, “This is Jockey Hole. He runs things.”

  “I don’t care who you are,” said Knard. “Is that the man? I think you’d better get out of the room.”

  He started forward, raising his medical bag and unzipping its top. Uncertainly, Gaffles looked to Jockey for orders. Jockey did not answer him.

  “Dr. Knard,” he said in a soft voice, “I don’t think you understand what’s at stake, do you?”

  “A man’s life,” said Knard shortly, and rolled back the covers from Erlking’s body. He drew his eyebrows together in a brief frown.

  “If that was all, you wouldn’t have come,” said Jockey.

  Knard shrugged, and began to draw on sterile gloves from his kit. Not looking up, he said, “He’s not too badly burned. Someone had better get me a supply of plasma-substitute, and a yard of ersatz skin, and a pound of number one tissue regenerant. Quickly!”

  “Tad!” said Jockey, without emphasis. “Get it from the med supply house on Hundred Third.”

  “They’re not on round-clock watch,” said Tad doubtfully.

  “Get it anyway. The lock artist came back with Gaffles; he’ll help. Don’t be long.”

  Tad nodded, grinning, and went out. Knard took antibiotic powders from his kit and began to dust them over the exposed flesh.

  “Dr. Knard,” Jockey said again. “Let me put some facts to you.”

  “Every time you breathe out you spray a mist of germs in the air,” said Knard abstractedly. “If you want Erlking to live, you’d better leave.”

  “He doesn’t have to last permanently,” said Jockey. “In the state he’s got to, death might be a mercy. Not the burning, I mean—just in his mind. He’s the former Remembrancer of Ahmed Lyken, and some of his hypnolocks have slipped.”

  “Yes, Mr. Hole,” said Knard with considerable patience. “I know. He was Lyken’s Remembrancer at the time when he imported the rho function field perceptor. That perceptor is the work of an advanced science, not of a primitive village culture.”

  Jockey’s face went suddenly fish-belly white, and his jaw fell. A look of utter incredulity replaced his usual calm expression. He said explosively, “So that was it!”

  Knard glanced up, startled. He said, “What?”

  “Look! Erlking roomed in the same block as Nevada. You know about Nevada and Lyken yesterday? You got it from Athlone, maybe? Gold! Then Nevada got his big news from Erlking, for sure. I wondered what it could be—this about Akkilmar. It—”

  Erlking’s eyes suddenly opened, as though the lids were on spring catches. “Akkilmar,” he said thickly and with difficulty, “is a small town of timber buildings near the sea and its inhabitants depend mainly on fishing. They are friendly and peaceably inclined to us. They have extraordinary abilities. Aaargh!”

  He threw his arms wide in the air, and groaned like a man in violent pain.

  Knard stepped back from the bed, peeling off his gloves. He sighed. “I don’t know anything about you, Mr. Hole,” he said. “But you’re perfectly right, of course. You’ve come to the right place with your problem. I’ve never yet met a hypnolock I couldn’t pick, though it may take an hour or two. How long do you think we’ve got?”

  “Till dawn, at most,” said Jockey cryptically. “About an hour or two.”

  “And where do we take the information when we’ve got it?”

  Gaffles switched his eyes from one to other of the speakers in bewilderment.

  “Manuel Clostrides is interested,” Jockey said. “I think we go to him.”

  “Fair enough,” nodded Knard. “Now I do want you out of here. I’m going to use some tricks which it would be much better to keep secret.”

  Jockey nodded after a fractional pause. His eyes still on Knard, he said, “Gaffles, go locate Clostrides for me. Get word back. We’re probably going to have to take Erlking to him, rather than the other way about.”

  An incoming call was signaled. Clostrides, his eyes going to the wall clock and noting that it was now almost four, spoke in answer.

  It was the duty guard in the main foyer who appeared on the screen, his brows knitted, his voice uncertain. He said, “Bailiff, we have some numbers down here who insist on seeing you. One of ’em says he’s Dr. Jome Knard, and he says that a number they have with them in a cripple chair is someone called Erlking who used to be Lyken’s Remembrancer.”

  “How long have they been trying to get to me?” said Clostrides, not betraying his emotion by a twitch of a muscle.

  “About a quarter-hour, Bailiff.”

  “You’re out of a job. Collect your pay and get off the premises. And send those people up here now!”

  He blanked the screen with a curt command, and got up from his chair.

  The first arrival was Knard; behind him, steering a powered wheelchair in which a lax-faced man half covered in ersatz skin moaned faintly, came Jockey, hesitant, unsure of himself in this
world he did not know.

  “Don’t let’s waste any more time,” Clostrides said. “Sit down and tell me. What is Akkilmar?”

  Jockey checked in mid-stride and then went on towards a chair, leaving Erlking in the middle of the floor. His eyes enviously studied Clostrides’ face.

  “Akkilmar,” said Knard as he sat down, “would appear to be the outpost of a rival civilization which is also exploiting the Tacket worlds, and which proposes to use Lyken as a means of exploiting ours also.”

  Clostrides didn’t say anything, but he closed his eyes.

  “You could have this from Erlking directly,” Knard went on. “But it comes out rather incoherently. I’ve managed to open about a hundred of his hypnolocks, but I hadn’t time to do a thorough job.

  “It all revolves around the rho function field perceptor. There must have been a reason why Lyken didn’t put two and two together when he was given the perceptor, which is plainly the product of a highly developed science. I think that reason can be defined this way.

  “Wherever the inhabitants of Akkilmar come from, they have some sort of mental discipline which permits Tacket travel without the use of mechanical aids. This has drawbacks as well as advantages. They have probably conducted extensive exploration of Tacket worlds distributed around their home world, much as the franchises we have explored are distributed around ours. There is a theoretical infinity of such worlds, of course, and the fact that they coincided with us on Lyken’s franchise was several million to one against, at least.

  “But having coincided, and having sized us up as rivals to be overcome, they created a phoney culture of a superficially primitive nature; Akkilmar. They contrived to make its disguise convincing by hypnotic techniques similar to our own. Alone among the staff of Lyken’s franchise, Erlking had his mind so crosshatched with interlocking associations that it was impossible to erase every clue leading to memories of Akkilmar’s true nature.

  “But, of course, hypnosis has limitations, such as the need to bring your subject under your control first. They seem therefore to have bided their time, sitting peacefully in their ‘primitive village’ and talking about their traditional culture—invented for the purpose to create a fog of mysticism around their manifest achievements—while manipulating influential individuals towards the current crisis.

  “Now the perceptor is important here again. I have long suspected, and I think I now have proof, that it’s a true analogue of reality. Don’t ask me to verbalize an explanation—all I can tell you is that rho function field math indicates interaction between the field and reality. How else could a lot of meshed forces in a box reflect outside events? And it follows that if you can control the rho function fields, you can control reality.”

  “What?” Clostrides jerked forward in his chair.

  Knard nodded, his high forehead gleaming with sweat. His voice grew thin and dry.

  “Giving us the perceptor, which we then imported into our own world, permitted them to deduce from the reality the fields reflected what was happening. They must have techniques permitting them to use the perceptor with extraordinary accuracy in ways we can’t achieve; it’s no good to us unless some accident has cut us off from most of our normal sense data, which otherwise masks the information the perceptor supplies.”

  “How about your patient?” said Jockey quietly, into the pause which followed Knard’s last word. The doctor nodded.

  “This man here,” he said to Clostrides, “this man Hole has some kind of gift—I don’t know what. He can deduce what’s important from evidence that doesn’t give grounds for logical proof. He’s got a knack of following hunches. He oughtn’t to be where he is.”

  Jockey shrugged and looked away.

  “About my patient,” Knard went on. “Tonight she was visited by someone who didn’t yield a trace in the perceptor fields. Someone from Akkilmar, that implies. And within a few minutes, the police arrived saying that unauthorized Tacketing had been detected in our apartment.”

  “But—” Clostrides wiped his face with a large handkerchief of imported silk. “But why are they so interested in your patient if she’s merely a subject who happens to be using a perceptor because she’s crippled?”

  “As I see it,” Knard said, and shivered a little, “she’s learned how to manipulate the field and control reality. After all, she’s used it for a longer time than my previous patients, and she’s driven by a more burning need. She wants revenge on her husband, Luis Nevada.”

  “Who is, of course, in Lyken’s franchise.” Clostrides put his hands together, linking the fingers, and then pushed them hard away from him so that the knuckles cracked. The gesture seemed to boil away some of his tension.

  “In effect, then,” he said, “when the invading forces go into Lyken’s franchise to repossess, they will be confronted with the achievements of the science of Akkilmar, and not Lyken’s forces only. The rho function field can’t exist in isolation.”

  “I don’t think it does,” Knard confirmed. “Erlking witnessed the contacts with Akkilmar that took place before the staff of Lyken’s franchise was hypnolocked against overmuch curiosity, or whatever was in fact done to them. Hints we’ve got from him so far indicate some technique of mental control, something associated with what he calls black boxes. That won’t be all.”

  “I beg to differ,” said a wheezing voice from the far end of the room. “That will indeed be all.”

  They all snapped their heads around to stare at the speaker. He was a fat man with a round, smiling face, dressed in a short shift and many metal bracelets and ornaments. There seemed to be no way in which he could have entered the room, for the door had not been opened.

  Clostrides spoke chokingly. He said, “Who—?” And got no further.

  The fat man walked forward unhurriedly. He said, “I come from Akkilmar, as a matter of fact, in order to tell you that you have woken up to the true state of affairs—fortunately for us—just that much too late.”

  He smiled at Clostrides, secure in his triumph. Meanwhile, without hurrying, moving in as natural fashion as possible, Jockey Hole drew a knife from the side of the high boot on his right foot and stood up. He put his arm smoothly around the fat man’s shoulder and opened a second smile in the fleshy folds of his throat.

  While the others were still staring thunderstruck, he said as calmly as though nothing had happened, “We haven’t much time now, you know. We’d better do something.”

  17

  ONE PHRASE kept turning over and over in Curdy Wence’s head, until he had almost forgotten what it had originally meant.

  Spit the string, spit the string, spit the string …

  He was on a string. He was on more of a string than he could have ever imagined.

  So long as he remained still and placid, he was normal. He could feel his body taut and vigorous within his warm clothes. He could feel the solid substance of the meal he had been given. He could feel the weight of his gun, and its cool hardness. He could see the darkness around the concealed fire post which had been assigned to him—a sort of revolving pallet beneath a mushroom-shaped dome of armor, camouflaged with vegetation. They had been told that no attack was expected before it was light. To Curdy’s strained imagination, the darkness seemed to be lifting and coming back by turns. Shadows of trees began to move over the ground. The quarter-moon had set.

  He could hear, too, strange night noises which all his attempts at calm could not make familiar. This countryside was rocky, patched with trees, shrubs and buses, networked with streams and ravines, and now sown with fire posts. The invaders might come from anywhere, from wherever their portals had been set up on their worlds of departure.

  He had a weapon. He was fed and had been invigorated with drugs. Only the string binding him prevented him from deserting to the enemy the minute they appeared.

  He had tried it out. Probably everyone had tried it out. And the pug in charge of this detachment, with his little black box, had told him to stay where he
was! The echo of that shattering command within his head still made his skull ring when he thought of it.

  There was nothing to be done except obey.

  Behind him, Nevada shifted on his pallet and moaned. Curdy snapped at him to shut up, and he did, but continued to whimper like a dog in misery. Nevada was a hell of a partner to have been allotted to him, thought Curdy.

  Maybe dawn would come soon, and the attack. He didn’t want it to come. But he didn’t want to sit here listening to Nevada’s complaints and the noises of the night. He wanted out. That was all.

  Hating both worlds, Curdy sat cradling his gun and watching the shadows outside the fire post come to life and crawl about the ground.

  Lanchery had managed an hour’s sleep before the message came through from Clostrides, and was getting into his battle-armor when it arrived. The messenger excused himself for intruding on grounds of urgency, and thrust the document into Lanchery’s hands before disappearing.

  He threw it on a table and went on dressing as he scanned it. With one boot on and the other in his hand, he recognized its full importance and forgot what he was doing. Still holding the boot, he sat down and began to read it closely. He was so engrossed in its astonishing news that he failed to hear the door softly open and close.

  But he heard the voice.

  At once everything else was driven out of his head, and he jumped to his feet. He said in a breathless voice, “Allyn! What—?”

  His heart felt as though it was spinning within his chest.

  The faint electric-blue glow of her clothing was luminous even though the room was lighted brightly, he saw. It seemed to cling dripping to her hand, as she raised it to her lips and signaled silence.

  “I know about that,” she said, pointing to the document on the table. “Ignore it!”

  “What?” Lanchery’s jaw dropped. He knew he looked ridiculous, but all his vanity and all his desire towards Allyn could not stop him from showing his amazement.